Posts Tagged ‘Virginia Standards of Learning’

New state standards matches for Chester Comix

Written on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 [permanent link]

See how my 27 comix match up with North Carolina’s social studies standards! http://www.chestercomix.com/standards-nc/

The background:
Chester the Crab was born in 1995 as a narrator for a short series of Earth Day comic strips in the Daily Press newspaper. He and I goofed around for a few years after that tackling such important subjects as: Which came first, crunchy or creamy peanut butter? But in 1999 the testing wave hitting the public schools was growing so big that the newspaper noticed and called together a roundtable of teachers to ask what we could do to help them.

“Make Chester tell stories linked to the state standards!”

I drew five years of Chester adventures with a pen in my right hand and the thick state standards document in my left. I built my stories from the ground up to cover the classroom material (key words in bold, timeline across the top of every page, lotsa maps . . .). Virginia’s Standards of Learning are pretty detailed, so it didn’t surprise me to find that most of my stories met standards in other states as well.

When I launched the Chester Comix business in 2003 to put his adventures in book form, I printed teacher’s guides with the matching standards on the back. But it wasn’t a great system: I couldn’t fit every state onto that list, and when a state tweaked its standards my printed list went out of date.

Now, finally, that idea has moved to this website. Click on the state standards box in the menu bar above and you’ll see a map of the U.S. Click on your state and see a grid of that state’s social studies curriculum and how Chester Comix can help teach it! Please let me know if I’m missing an important detail, or if you think other Chester titles apply. We can edit these grids as the classroom reality changes!

(PS – creamy peanut butter came first)

Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, North Carolina, state standards, Virginia Standards of Learning
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