Running a Successful Manga Club: Crafts, Films, Charades & More!

I've been running a high school Manga Club for five years now and have certainly seen it rise and fall in popularity. Throughout it all we've had our core members and I've tried hard to ensure we have it every week.

It's a lot of fun but can be challenging to find activities for the students to do every single week. Here are some of the activities that I have found to be most successful. They can also be adapted to any teen library club!


I'd also like to highlight some of the most popular manga series that we carry in our library:


Attack on Titan (15+)
Barakamon
Black Butler (15+)
Bleach
Blue Exorcist (15+)
Dawn of the Arcana
Death Note
Dragonball Z
Fairy Tail
Fullmetal Alchemist
Fruit Baskets
Hero Academy
Hikaru no Go
The Legend of Zelda
Naruto
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
One Piece
One Punch Man
Ouran High School Host Club
Pokémon
Yu-Gi-Oh!


Now, on with the activities!



Film Club

We watch a lot of anime. You've got to be careful as there is a lot of anime that is inappropriate for many younger students.

My approach has been to ask students who are 11 years old to come in with notes when we watch an anime that is 12+. Having that conversation with their parents makes a huge difference. Here's a list of films we've watched recently:

The Boy and the Beast
Grave of the Fireflies
Howl's Moving Castle
Kiki's Delivery Service
My Neighbor Totoro
Pom Poko
Ponyo
Porko Rosso
Princess Mononoke
Spirited Away

Image Dice

This was a recent game that we tried and the students didn't want to stop. To start, I made paper dice. On one set of dice I wrote nouns like Troll, Alien, Boy, Girl, Dragon, Ghost and on the other verbs like Fighting, Laughing, Dying, Running, Flying, Crying.

When I rolled the dice the students had five minutes to draw whatever came up. We then voted on our favourites. You can add whatever you want to your dice to make it as fun as possible!


Bookmark Making


Using a program called Canva I had the students make their own manga themed bookmarks. This is always a favourite activity.

Full instructions on what settings to use in Canva can be found here.


Padlet


If you've never used Padlet before, click here for a great tutorial on how to get started. We used Padlet for one simple reason, for Manga Club members to tell me what manga they'd like the library to purchase.

 It can be used for much, much more however, highly recommend you introduce this technology to your students!


Blackout Poetry


Blackout Poetry gets used all the time but I had never seen it done using weeded manga before. It's trickier, and you've got to sell it to some students but once they got into it they really got into it.

We had a blast changing the words and images around to some old ratty manga that I was going to throw out.


Quizzes


Students love quizzes, there are so many quiz programs out there now it'll make your head spin. My favourites are:
Socrative
Flipquiz
Quizziz
Kahoot!
Jeopardy Rocks!

You can find pre-made manga quizzes on some of these platforms which will save you some time but otherwise prepare to spend an hour or more plugging in questions. Or, better yet, have one of your manga obsessed students make one for you!


Charades
This is an easy, free and fun way to bring in new students to your Manga Club. You split them into teams and give them a manga character or title to act out.

It gets silly, rowdy and very competitive but it's worth it!


Book Trailers


I love making book trailers with our Manga Club because they are some of the most creative students in the school.

I typically use Animoto but I'm sure there are tons of other programs out there. Lots of great things can be created with this activity!


Mini Art Canvases
As I previously mentioned, Manga Club students are really creative. I purchased a bunch of 4" x 4" mini art canvases from Amazon and let them make their own creations. They loved it.

Most wanted to take theirs home but some let me keep them up in the library.


Manga Jenga (Ma-Jenga)
This one took some time. Essentially I used whiteboard tape and created manga questions on individual pieces of Jenga then let them play the game as normal except they had to answer the question correctly else put the piece back on the stack.

Full game rules can be found here.


Guess That Manga


Another free and easy game that the students loved. It's kind of like Taboo.  I split them into teams, one member took a piece of paper out of a jar. It could be a character, title or anime.

The student then had to get their team to guess what was on the slip of paper without actually saying the name that was written down.


Manga Zoom
This one was simple and fun. I zoomed in really close on popular manga characters and had the students in teams try and guess what they were. They had one minute to guess each one.

We did tons of rounds and they vehemently defended their choices, lots of fun!


Origami
This one's obvious. We've done so much origami I've lost track. However, click here for a link on one of our most popular ones, the blinking eye.

20 Questions


Another easy one - stick the names of manga characters to the backs of students and have them try and guess who they are using Yes or No questions!

Shiritori

Shiritori is a traditional Japanese game where you as a player are forced to say a word that begins with the last letter of the word spoken by the previous player. For instance, if player one says "Naruto", player 2 must say a manga related word that starts with "O" like "One-Piece", and so on. again, this gets very competitive and is always a good laugh.

Manga Scrabble

The students are divided into two teams, each team member "donates" the first & last letters of their first and last names to their group. Then, they are given 5 minutes to come up with as many Manga-related things using just those letters.



Manga Fortune Cookies


Students start by writing their own fortunes. Then they make paper fortune cookies using instructions I found here.

They loved making these and giving them to their friends!