political cartoons

Yesterday I introduced Sly to political cartoons through this website: http://cagle.msnbc.com/teacher/. As you might imagine, it is very left-wing liberal, but that should be expected from msnbc. But Sly did find the concept of political cartoons interesting. I expected as much: He likes to draw AND he's a kid with an opinion. He was MADE for political cartooning!

So, anyway, we discussed the swine flu cartoon, and we also discussed the suggested questions. I must make clear that we didn't just 'answer' the questions suggested, but actually discussed the questions, defining terms, considering biases inherent in the questions as asked, considering other information that might be pertinent to the question but left out of the provided discussion material, etc. It made for some interesting conversation. The first cartoon (the swine flu one) is relatively bias neutral (relatively!) compared to the following 4 cartoons. I read them after Sly and I were done. The bias is MUCH greater in those.

Following his little introduction to the concept of political cartoons, Sly promptly took two drawings he had completed just prior to our discussion and turned them into his own political cartoons. They were a little awkward for me to understand at first, but hey, so are many other political cartoons at times!

Staying on the swine flu theme, Sly added a bottle of hand sanitizer to the drawing of the starfish and added a thought bubble that says: "I need this to avoid swine flu people!" (Btw, we still haven't figured out why his starfish is smoking! Hmmmm . . . )

Then Sly flipped to a shark he had drawn about to bite a hook and added another thought bubble: "I would be liberal to bite the hook cause then I wouldn't be here to stop abortion."

Yeah, they're a little odd, but afterall, he just added a comment on a political issue to a drawing he already had made. The next step is to come up with a unique drawing that actually relates to the political issue he has in mind and that also makes the statement on that issue that he wishes to convey. I think he's up for the challenge.