My visit to Roberge Elementary

with Bruce Van Patter

2008-2009 School Visits

My visit to Roberge Elementary!

I had great fun with the kids at Roberge! Here are the stories we invented:

The assembly stories

The four ingredients: a genius kid inside a human body looking for a gadget up against a evil spider guy

The story: This was a tough one, because I couldn't decide what to draw as the setting. I was thinking about showing the kid in a bloodstream, but then it wouldn't look like much around him -- just blobby shapes in something like a tunnel. So I decided to make him trying to get back out of the body after he had retrieved the gadget his evil genius father had implanted in some guy to control his mind.

Time is running out and our Genius Junior is already starting to grow large again. Just as he's about to leap, though, the robot spider guard of the gadget zaps him with his spiderweb rope.

This was a fun one to draw, and I had a nice long lunch to put the finishing details on. I hope you all like it, because I'm really happy with how it turned out. I rarely get to make white letters for the title -- it just takes too long!

Workshop fun!

Check out these stories which all came from our 40-minute workshops:

		I tried really hard to get the same pose of this fun doodle of a shark wearing Sherlock Holmes' hat. He's trying to be a detective and find the missing huge sand dollar that's worth a lot of money in the undersea world. But he's not only got to find the sand dollar, he's got to find it before an evil octopus does!
		Who has it? A girl shark he likes. But the girl shark has been captured by none other than Sherlock Holmes! (I was very glad that one boy in the workshop recognized him in my drawing!) There were so many fun ideas in this story!

Pigs, cowboys and aliens. What do they have in common? This story!

We imagined a pig from another dimension came up through a hole in the desert . He was followed by an evil pig!

Our hero wants to get the evil pig out of this world, but the local rancher has covered up the hole with rocks. How will he get them off? The evil pig has a controller that can move things. How will he get the bad pig to help him? By promising gold in the hole.

I drew a bull about to bump the bad pig back to his world!

Open up and say AH! What fun we had inventing stories. Whether it was in the assembly with 3rd-5th grades, or the workshops with just the 3rd graders, we really enjoyed being creative.

Now, Roberge kids -- keep those ideas flowing. You have great stories inside you just waiting to come out.

Keep up the good work!

And while you're here, check out the fun stuff on my site!

In addition to all the free material on this site, I have downloadable books that are perfect for keeping kids writing in school or at home!

(click on books to see)

The Adventures of Pirate Dog
Picture prompts are a great way to inspire kids to write! Here are 26 of my best drawings with fun, pre-writing worksheets

Write Your Own
Cartoons!
Kids can add the
dialogue and their special touches to my funny comic strips filled with wacky characters!

Sparks: Year One
Here’s a fantastic resource for teachers: a whole year of weekly creative writing lessons built around wacky holidays!

More to come!

	Pick the ingredients to stories and click through to see how I've started them. Then you finish the story!		Make a character out of some funny people I've drawn for you!			Strange news is happening! Let my Headline Maker give you a really weird headline. Then write a story!
click on the images to go to the writing activities