So there's this game that I love to play with the Japanese students that I teach English to. It's a variation of the Spiderman Saves Mary Jane game from GenkiEnglish.com, although my personal variation (which the students get a HUGE kick out of) is "Save Wolverine's Teddy Bear." I love making these games more "politically correct," because the more the game subverts gender roles, the more the kids find it FREAKIN' HILARIOUS.
In my variation of the game I use a roster of six superheroes: Superman, Spiderman, movie!Wolverine, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and movie!Storm. With the exception of Wonder Woman, most of my middle school students could recognize pictures of all of these superheroes easily. The younger elementary school students would never recognize the X-Men characters, but that's understandable as they are only old enough to have possibly seen X3, and that's totally not an appropriate movie for first graders.
Now, pictures of the superheroes that I use to play the game. I previously used a really good fanart image of Supergirl that I found by exhaustive searching via Google Images one day. I say "exhaustive" because it took me something like an hour to find an image of Supergirl that would be appropriate to stick up on a blackboard in front of a bunch of elementary school students. And yep, in the end, I finally had to resort to cribbing somebody's fanart.
Unfortunately for me, I did not bookmark the fanart website. And last week my Supergirl picture was ripped by an overenthusiastic sixth grader who helped me clean up after the game. So I needed to find and print out a new Supergirl picture.
Of course I didn't think that I would be doing another elementary school visit for a couple of days. So I procrastinated finding a new Supergirl picture. Then I showed up for work at Namiai Elementary/Middle School on Tuesday and was informed that, contrary to what my schedule said, I was doing my last class of the year with the sixth graders TODAY. And they really liked the "Save Wolverine's Teddy Bear" game, and it was an excellent way to both review what we had learned so far, and end the semester with a bang. I also had a whole ten minutes of preparation time and no lesson materials, so I wasn't about to come up with something new before first period. Nope, I was gonna go with Wolverine's Teddy Bear, because 99.9% of the prep was already done and I knew that the kids would love it. The problem was - I had no Supergirl picture. So rather than playing the game without Supergirl, I decided to use my precious ten minutes to find and print out a new picture of her.
In ten minutes of searching, this was the best that I could find. Among the images that I found, that one was the only relatively high-res image that I could print out on a full sheet of paper, that also didn't look too porny.
The following day I was sent to Achi Dai-San Elementary School. I played the Wolverine's Teddy Bear game with a group of third-graders. They all went "Eeeeeeeeeeee?!" when I revealed the new picture of Supergirl. After the game, a bunch of them grabbed the picture and started passing it around, and these were their comments, translated from Japanese:
"She looks scary!"
"Her eyes are scary!"
"Is she supposed to be pretty?!"
"She's gross."
I had never seen the kids so fascinated by a picture before. They never nitpicked any of my other superhero pictures like this.
Well, the critics have spoken. Michael Turner's Supergirl is scary and gross. And now I need to find a new Supergirl picture again.
In my variation of the game I use a roster of six superheroes: Superman, Spiderman, movie!Wolverine, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and movie!Storm. With the exception of Wonder Woman, most of my middle school students could recognize pictures of all of these superheroes easily. The younger elementary school students would never recognize the X-Men characters, but that's understandable as they are only old enough to have possibly seen X3, and that's totally not an appropriate movie for first graders.
Now, pictures of the superheroes that I use to play the game. I previously used a really good fanart image of Supergirl that I found by exhaustive searching via Google Images one day. I say "exhaustive" because it took me something like an hour to find an image of Supergirl that would be appropriate to stick up on a blackboard in front of a bunch of elementary school students. And yep, in the end, I finally had to resort to cribbing somebody's fanart.
Unfortunately for me, I did not bookmark the fanart website. And last week my Supergirl picture was ripped by an overenthusiastic sixth grader who helped me clean up after the game. So I needed to find and print out a new Supergirl picture.
Of course I didn't think that I would be doing another elementary school visit for a couple of days. So I procrastinated finding a new Supergirl picture. Then I showed up for work at Namiai Elementary/Middle School on Tuesday and was informed that, contrary to what my schedule said, I was doing my last class of the year with the sixth graders TODAY. And they really liked the "Save Wolverine's Teddy Bear" game, and it was an excellent way to both review what we had learned so far, and end the semester with a bang. I also had a whole ten minutes of preparation time and no lesson materials, so I wasn't about to come up with something new before first period. Nope, I was gonna go with Wolverine's Teddy Bear, because 99.9% of the prep was already done and I knew that the kids would love it. The problem was - I had no Supergirl picture. So rather than playing the game without Supergirl, I decided to use my precious ten minutes to find and print out a new picture of her.
In ten minutes of searching, this was the best that I could find. Among the images that I found, that one was the only relatively high-res image that I could print out on a full sheet of paper, that also didn't look too porny.
The following day I was sent to Achi Dai-San Elementary School. I played the Wolverine's Teddy Bear game with a group of third-graders. They all went "Eeeeeeeeeeee?!" when I revealed the new picture of Supergirl. After the game, a bunch of them grabbed the picture and started passing it around, and these were their comments, translated from Japanese:
"She looks scary!"
"Her eyes are scary!"
"Is she supposed to be pretty?!"
"She's gross."
I had never seen the kids so fascinated by a picture before. They never nitpicked any of my other superhero pictures like this.
Well, the critics have spoken. Michael Turner's Supergirl is scary and gross. And now I need to find a new Supergirl picture again.
