Activities Perfect for a Comic Con

This is the third post in a series about Comic Cons.

After you have an idea of what you want your Comic Con to look like: after school, half day, full day, essentials only you need to think about what activities you’d like to include. The activities you choose to include in your Comic Con make the day.

The kids and most of the staff don’t know what went into planning the Comic Con. They don’t know how much it cost, how many hours you spent creating the schedule, the number of experiments and crafts or games you tested out to make sure things went smoothly. This is why the activities you end up choosing are critical. You want the students to experience the most fun and authentic Comic Con experience as developmentally possible.

Call in the Experts

When we reached out to a Comic a Con expert our first year, one recommendation given was to get people in. They suggested authors, artists, performers (aka cosplayers). Brining folks in makes the experience all that more authentic. The San Diego Comic Con has all of this through exhibitors and panels, and it is one of the reasons why it is such a successful event.

I bet you could get parents and others in the community to come in dressed as Storm Troopers, an Avenger, Dog Man, Pete the Cat, or any other book character. The kids will love having their photo taken with them and it will add a layer to your photo booths.

If you are fortunate enough to get an author or artist in, make it part of the schedule. Maybe you can get a local artist in to run a station and teach the kids how to create their comic book character. Maybe you can get an author to come in and do a presentation about being an author or do a writing workshop with the students. Reach our to parents and local comic stores to see who would be willing to donate time.

Choosing Activities at the Secondary Level

If you are hosting a Comic Con for secondary students, the activities will most likely mirror the content areas. Science classes could have experiments that unveil the science behind superheroes like Storm, Magneto, Mr.Stretch, Superman’s speed, etc. Perhaps social studies and history classes can uncover the real world events that potentially inspired the stories. The arts can create Manga, graphic design, etc.

Honestly, the possibilities are endless and because your building is filled with content area experts they will most likely be able to come up with great activities with just a few inspirational suggestions. And let’s be honest, this takes care of a great deal of planning for you. Not to mention, will most likely require zero funds because they will already have the necessary materials!

Choosing Elementary Activities

When planning activities for an elementary Comic Con, you are going to want to choose things that are connected to their favorite characters and literature as well as fun, fairly simple, and quick. You’re also going to want to think about which activities best accentuate your library media program and your diverse student population.

One thing we knew from the start was that we wanted activities that would engage a variety of students. We knew we wanted movement, art, literature, high energy, and calming.

Where exactly does one turn when looking for perfect elementary Comic Con activities? Pinterest. For the most part, we knew what types of activities we wanted. We just needed directions, templates, and printables for some.

In the end, we decided on the following and slightly tweak them from year to year.

Movement:

• We really wanted quidditch and we have had to be really creative and super flexible when putting it into place. One year it rained and we had to put all outdoor activities inside. This drastically changed the game.
• Superhero Academy helped us honor the comic book theme. Plus superhero movies are HUGE right now.
• Jedi Training has had to be slightly altered over the years. We have turned light saber training into light saber tag, allowing more students to participate.
• Story Yoga came to us because we knew that we wanted yoga, a calming activity for our students. We were going to originally thrown on Cosmic Yoga, but we are fortunate enough to to have three certified yoga instructors on staff. Luckily, each year they come up with book and sequence, and this allows us to focus on other activities.

Arts

Which art activities you include will depend on your available resources, prep time, and money. You could go all out and have a make and take situation. Perhaps the kids are making paper puppets, play doh characters, or masks. If you can get enough materials for everyone to take something home, this is awesome!

We knew that we wanted our students to have choice when creating, so we created stations within the different Comic Con art rooms.

• Directed Drawing is a great activity because of how it teaches students how to follow step by step directions. The Book Wrangler has some great directed drawing directions that are related to some favorite books!
• Use LEGOs, Playfoh, Magnatiles, K’Nex and more for students to build their own characters, lairs, and vehicles.
• Students can create their own character puppets with paper bags, plates, or popsicle sticks. They can complete a glyph to create a character or super hero. They can also complete character ID cards.

Literacy

• Write your own comics with Pigeon, Fly Guy, and Elephant and Piggie (great for younger students). You can also print out comic book templates for your older students to write their own Comic Books.
• Two apps that are great for story writing are Toontastic and Scholastic’s Dav Pilkey app. Toontastic talks them through the retiring process. The Scholastic app (WiFi needed) uses the infamous Captain Underpants characters. Both are student favorites.
• If you are not a tablet building, you may be interested in students using Make Belief Comix or Powtoons.
• Grab the graphic novels off of the shelves that your students over look and put them out to read. If you can scoop up some comic books on the cheap (reach out to local comic book stores), you may be able to send every child home with a comic book of their own.
• This past year, we created an I Spy station. We put out I Spy and Seek and Find books. We also created giant seek and fin posters that we hung around the room.

Other Options

You may have enough to do with the above activities. Or you may want to provide more. A few other activities that we have to give the day a true Comic Con feel include:

• Superhero Science. Have some cool science activities out that take about ten minutes. Definitely test them first. We have had a lot of fails.
• Giant Indoor Games. We have giant floor puzzles, giant tic tac toe, Jenga, boggle, Yahtzee, and giant checkers. We really want giant chess but haven’t been able to work that out yet.
• Photo Booths are great. Last year, we made this an option. This year we included them in the rotation. I am thinking that next year they will be their own rotation with all photo booths fairly near each other.
• Robot Races were a hit one year. But also a bit time consuming because students don’t always remember how to quickly use the bots to get the desired effect.

This last year we had a BreakoutEdu as a station and the entire grade was in the cafe for 45 minutes. If you choose to do a breakout, I recommend using the digital breakouts. All you need is a protector, QR Code linked to the game, and some dry erase materials.

We have also been eyeing post it art, stick together, and giant mancala coloring pages as potential stations.

For every station that we have, we have a sign outside the door to clearly mark the location. If the station happens to have multiple activities within it, we also have directions available. The directions are great for staff who are running the station, unstaffed stations to keep things transparent, or as a reminder for students of what is expected.

You can download these signs and directions by completing this quick form. There is also an editable form of each for you to customize signage to suit your own Comic Con needs.

In the end, whatever you choose will be engaging because you are choosing with your students and program in mind. Next week, I’ll share some tips and resources for pulling this all together.