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Reflection
My comic entitled Everyday Superheroes is designed for kindergarten students studying
social studies Unit 2 The People in Our Neighborhood. Following the ADDIE instructional
design model, I started by analyzing my learners, four to six year old students who are in
kindergarten, and my goal, to introduce workers in the community (SSKE1).

In the design phase, I

identified the specific learning objective that students will be able to describe what different
community helpers do to help us.
Using Pixton, I have developed the comic Everyday Superheroes that includes a scene for
each of the community workers identified in the standard. Everyday Superheroes can be used
with the whole class as the hook for the lesson and in centers with small groups or individually to
reinforce one way that each of the workers helps in the community. After the introduction using
the comic, students can then choose one of the workers and draw their own pictures, adding words
if they can, of other ways that one of the workers helps in the community. I hope to have the
opportunity to implement and evaluate the success of the comic this school year.
I chose to use a comic to introduce this standard because it provides an image and a simple
statement of what each community worker does. After reading the comic (words and pictures),
together as a class, each student will have a starting point when writing with pictures and words
more about the community worker of his/her choice. Comics, cartoons and graphic novels are
important to include in the classroom (and library) because they utilize the dual coding theory to
present information in two ways instead of just one. The use of words and pictures allows students
more than one way to understand the content presented. Additionally, the formats encourage
active processing and are appealing to students.
Two of the principles of design that I integrated into Everyday Superheroes were
repetition and unity. One of the main reasons I chose the superhero theme and selected the

superhero to be the main character repeated in each scene is that many kindergarten-aged students
like superheroes. The superhero acts as a guide to introduce the student to various community
workers.
I attempted to include several of Mayers multimedia principles in Everyday Superheroes.
The comic format uses words and pictures together, not just words which is the essence of the
multimedia principle. I tried to limit each frame to a background indicative of the community
worker, the superhero, the community worker and minimal text to reduce distractions and adhere to
the coherence principle. Finally, the comic format lends itself well to spatial contiguity because the
speech bubbles for each character in a specified scene are contained within the designated frame.
Of the three terms comics, cartoons and graphic novels, comics is the broadest and includes
the other two. A comic is a combination of drawings and/or words to express meaning or tell a
story. A cartoon is a specific type of comic that relates a message in only one or two frames, like a
political cartoon. Since it is short but has potential to communicate a great deal of meaning, a
cartoon can require more advanced critical thinking skills in order for the students to fully
understand it. A graphic novel is a longer comic that is sometimes bound as book and has some of
the same characteristics as a print novel such as plot, theme and well-developed characters.
Graphic novels that are fiction can be studied just as novels are in English language arts classrooms,
and nonfiction graphic novels are excellent to use a supplemental texts in science and social studies.
My biggest challenge in completing the assignment was selecting a tool to create a comic. I
hope to carve out some time later this summer to experiment with more of the online comics
creation tools and explore their capabilities.