Cartooning and Comics in Your Homeschool Curriculum

"How can it help his academics?" a parent might ask. I never asked that question when my two sons would doodle in the margins of their notebooks and school papers. These doodlings just happened and they were a common sight on their papers. They didn't seem to add to or detract from the quality of their schoolwork, so, if nothing else, I would get a little amusement when I looked at their papers.

Some kids like to doodle on their school papers. That's probably a big part of how my oldest son developed and improved his drawing skills over the years. No, he does not do realism art, nor does he aspire to achieve that type of artistic ability. His art is comic style--cartoons--and if I collected his many years' worth of doodlings, we could probably produce quite a funny book of random pictures.

We've heard that we should find out what our child's area of specialization is and let her hone and develop that. If I were tuned in enough to my son's doodlings, maybe I would have recognized his gift earlier. It wasn't until after he created his comic strip, "Carl and Ben...and Beeky," when he was 8 years old, and drew...and drew...and drew...until he had drawings everywhere (under the bed, in the laundry hamper, under the pile of newspapers, on the kitchen table, in the toy box, etc.), that I started wondering if this was more than just a passing fancy. I finally got the cue when he started showing other kids his comic strips, and they thoroughly enjoyed them, that maybe his comics could be shared with a wider circle of kids, like, kids all over the country. And how else could that happen except by publishing his comics?