Sa-Shai Daniels' Portfolio

The Comic Life project focused on wars in which the US was involved with. We started this project after we had completed a social studies unit on American wars. For this project we were separated into groups and given a war to focus on. My group’s project centered on the cold war. To begin the project reviewed all the information that we had collected in class, prior starting the actual project. We researched a lot of information about the relationship between America and the Soviet Union because they were the main players in the Cold War.

During the project we were required to create a comic book about the Cold War. Each Day a group member would add to the comic for homework. It was important to make sure that things were in chronological order so that the comic would read like an actual story. The final product for this project had to be a well written comic book that discussed all the important information about the Cold War.

This project sounded easy at first, but I soon learned that it wasn’t going to be such a walk in the park. One of the larger problems I had with my group was figuring out who was going to write what; figuring out how to divide the information between the different parts of the comic was a very complicated process. Eventually my group and I solved this problem by having a long discussion about who would write about the events we wanted to include in the comic. For example I wrote about the effects of the war in America one day, and someone else may write about the effects of the war in Berlin the next.

The quality that I utilized the most during the Comic Life project was inquiry. At its core this was a research project; as a student I’ve done a significant amount of research, and I’ve never researched something without inquiring about it first. Inquiry is all about asking questions and finding answers, and that is exactly what I did during this project. I think the Comic Life project helped strengthen my inquiry skills because while doing this project I practiced using inquiry a lot. Using inquiry on a regular basis is healthy, but sometimes I get lazy and my curiosity is stunted. The reason this project was so great was because it was able to get me thinking again.

The Comic Life project really helped to refresh the information we had already learned about the cold war in class. Taking notes and spending a few days of class on the cold war was nice, but this project was a great way of making sure that the information stayed in our heads. After doing so much research on the cold war I know information that I won’t forget, and can use for future assignments.