Create Your Own Superhero Adventure

Children dressed as superheroes
Children dressed as superheroes · Unsplash

Age Range: Elementary, Middle School

Learning Objective: Students will use storytelling and writing skills to create their own adventures featuring heroes and villains, and select music to accompany their creations.

Teacher Note: Adult support may be required for younger children. Some content might be a little scary for young children.

Strengthen and reinforce your storytelling and literacy skills while integrating music!

In the first lesson, we focused on heroes, and in the second lesson we learned about villains.

Now that we've thought about heroes and villains, let's think about what happens when they get together in the same story.

1. Begin by writing down or saying out loud a list of characters. Of course, we have a hero and villain, but who else is involved? Here is a list of some possibilities:

• The Hero's sidekick
• Innocent bystanders
• The Villain's henchmen/minions

2. What objects will be important to the story? Choose one or a few.

• Secret weapon
• Secret formula
• Key to the city
• A great costume or disguise
• Special vehicles driven by the hero/villain

3. What events will happen? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• The villain plots to take over the city
• The hero loses her memory temporarily
• An evil robot gets involved
• A good robot helps out

4. What is the setting? Where does your story take place? A few choices:

• A real city
• A make-believe city
• Outer space
• The future

5. Write a short hero and villain story or draw a comic, incorporating the elements you brainstormed above.

Here are the parts of a good story, in sequence:

a. Establish characters and setting.
b. Conflict. What's the problem? What happens? This is the exciting part!
c. Solution. How does the problem get resolved?
d. Lesson. What do we learn at the end?

6. And now for the most important part: creating a soundtrack for your story. Music can help tell each part of the story. A theme song for a hero or a villain helps establish their character. Exciting music during the conflict helps make it more dramatic and suspenseful.

Music lesson grid
 
Katie Condon/MPR

Use the grid below to pick music to go along with your story. You can use any kind of music you want- there are no rules! Cue up the music so you can use it as a soundtrack when you retell or re-enact your story.

The next time you watch a movie with heroes and villains, notice the music. Does it help make the villain seem more evil? Does it make a battle scene more exciting, or a scary part more suspenseful?

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Clean Water Land and Legacy Amendment

This activity is made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.

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