By Arune Singh

Marvel.Com recently brought you news of an ambitious after-school program in Brooklyn's PS124 which utilizes Marvel's groundbreaking ULTIMATE COLLECTIONS EN ESPANOL to teach students how to read and speak English. At the time, teacher Daniel Tandarich spoke of his plans and the inspirations behind this outreach program, drawing rave reviews from Marvel fandom.

With his first session of ULTIMATE COLLECTION-infused classes under his belt, Tandarich spoke to Marvel.Com about what happened—and brought along a few photos too!

The following text is by Tandarich:

I am so happy with the way the lessons turned out using the ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN collections in Spanish and English. The reactions from the students were so positive and they wanted to keep learning using the books when the lessons were over. When students are enjoying learning that much, then I feel like I have really done my job. Here are some photos of the students and the reading lessons I put together from ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN COLECCION EN ESPANOL.

Lesson 1: Using a common vocabulary

Here we have our first day using the books and I wanted to work on having a common language when discussing the story. We talked about the parts of a comic book and how this type of storytelling is different from other types. I introduced them to words like panel, dialogue balloons, thought balloons, sound effects and splash pages. We identified these various parts while reading the first issue. This gave us a common vocabulary for the lessons to follow. We used post-it strips to label the parts on a photocopied page from the book.

Lesson 2: Sequencing



I really had a lot of fun putting together this next lesson. It was all about sequencing and thinking about what makes the most sense. I made some color photocopies from the book (issue #2, p. 8) from a page in the second issue and cut them up into panels. Before we read the second issue, I gave each student a ziplock bag with the cut-out panels and they were to "put the page back together again" in sequence, focusing on what makes the most sense. They had some great discussions with each other about what panel should be first, second, etc. This is where I can really understand their thinking. Once they had decided on the order, they glued the panels onto their paper "putting the page back together again."

Lesson 3: Clarifying words

This lesson focused on clarifying words. Students identified words in English that they were curious about in the text. They then found the Spanish equivalent in the Spanish version of the ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN collection. This was our comic book version of the English/Spanish dictionary. Then, as a group, we came up with a definition. The word lists came out great! We had venom and veneno, spider and arana, invincible and invencible and anonymous and anonimato, along with their definitions. The illustrations in the comic served as great clues to help the kids figure out the words and their meanings.

I tried to make each lesson match up with one of the issues so that we were reading the sequential stories at the same time the students were learning specific lessons. This gave an amazing "what's going to happen next?" feeling to the students. We continued reading the issues and had discussions about what Peter Parker was doing. The students wrote down predictions about what they thought was going to happen next in the story. Everyone wanted to read until the end and wanted the lessons to continue after we had finished. That's a great feeling!

Thank you to all of the students who participated—Margarita, Rosario, Louis, Richard, and Alejandra—for your fantastic work and thank you Marvel for making the collection in Spanish. I think comic books are the new trend in education and my students would agree.

Gracias from Mr. Tandarich and the students from P.S. 124 in Brooklyn!
Marvel.Com would like to thank Mr. Tandarich and his students for sharing their story wish us!