We decided to focus our activity on a year 4 objective for Fiction and Poetry: Writing composition from the PNS.
Our activity: First we are going to ask the children to compose a list of superheroes in their groups on their tables. The teacher will then scribe their list onto the main board and sort them into female and male characters. We will then ask the children what they notice about the two lists, this will show the children that there is a distinct lack of female superheroes, and we want them to consider this. We will ask the children to try to explain why they think this is the case, and talk about what these female superheroes look like, we also want the children to think of any examples that challenge these stereotypes.
We will then watch an episode of ‘Mona the Vampire’ and talk about Mona as a female superhero.
We are then going to ask the children to invent their own superhero, and draw it. The children will then create either an adventure story or a cartoon strip containing their character, depending on ability.
We decided that the focus for our lesson would not be the issue of gender because we want this to be the first lesson to introduce this concept. We would carry out further lessons to look at gender and how it is portrayed in film and media, and make this message more explicit, but for now feel this is adequate.
Something we would also like to encourage the children to look at, which we would carry out in further lessons would be what the females in cartoons are portrayed as through their image.
The website that we went to was 
