18 Manga Club Activity Ideas

 I've been running Manga Club for nine years now, it has been one of my most popular programmes.

I'm just going to share some of the most popular activities we've run:

5 Second Rule

A fast paced but hard game, students have 5 seconds to "name 3 manga villains" or "name 3 manga that start with the letter 'D'". They are put into teams, this gets heated and loud but it is a lot of fun.

Blackout Poetry

Sometimes our manga falls apart from overuse, when this happens, we will make blackout poetry from them. The students black out words they don't want, and images, and what is left behind makes a nice poem, they really get into this one!

Manga Deathmatch

This will get rowdy. 5 or 6 teams of three or four students. Each team starts with 10 points.

Read the question out, if a team gets it right, they get to remove 1 point from a team. Then one person from the team can shoot a small basketball / piece of balled up paper into a hoop. If they sink it, they get to remove 3 more points from another team. Last team standing wins. Again, rowdy. 

Charades

Easy, fun and free - put students into teams, give them characters or scenes from manga / anime to act out, it will get rowdy. 

Exquisite Corpse

Large piece of A3 paper, divide the students into two teams. One team member drew a head, it could be the head of anything, but we try to steer it towards manga / anime related. Fold the paper so the next person cannot see the head, they then have to draw the body, and so on. The result is a surrealist image that is usually quite interesting. 

Film Club

We've used Into Film which is now largely streaming but still has some appropriate anime for students to watch. What I would do is watch the film over a series of manga clubs and then have a quiz on the film at a later date, it was very popular!

Finish This Comic

This one takes some time but you simply print off a comic book / manga panel, draw something yourself that is manga related and have the students finish the comic. 

How to Draw

Sometimes the students simply like to draw from our "how to draw manga" books, they just like to sit in the library and doodle for 45 minutes, it's fun to see what they male 

Image Dice

This one is fun, you make two paper dice cubes, one one cube you write the names of popular manga / anime characters and on the other cube you write an action, it can be anything silly or strange or whatever you want. You get a student to roll the dice, the group then has 2 minutes to draw whatever has come up on the dice. It might "Naruto robbing a bank" or something ridiculous, the students will really enjoy it.

Make a Manga

Whiteboard, 6 boxes are drawn, first box, a character, second box, something the character wants more than anything, third box, something that is stopping the character from getting that thing. Fourth box, someone /something who will help the character overcome this challenge. Fifth Box, how that person/ thing helps them. Sixth box, do they get the thing they want? Now get them to write it / draw it out. 

Manga Jenga

This took a lot of time - I used whiteboard tape and wrote manga quiz questions which were then stuck to Jenga pieces. The students took the Jenga piece out and had to answer the question, if they got it wrong, they had to put the piece back! 

Mini Art Canvases

I purchased a bunch of 4" x 4" canvases, had students create 4" square manga art and then used Modge Podge to let them glue the paper to the canvas, this was to avoid using paint, it was a big hit!

Padlet

If you've never used Padlet before, here is a good tutorial.  It is essentially a giant communal wall where your group can post things and you as the admin can see them appear in real time. I used Padlet in the past to allow students to tell me what manga we should buy. There are a million ways to use it. 

Pictionary

You can't go wrong with Pictionary, give them topics / characters / scenarios, get them to draw them, give them 2 minutes to guess per team, it will get noisy.

Puzzle Pieces

I printed off covers of manga books, cut them up, two teams had to work together to put them all together, a tough challenge but they loved it. 

Shiritori

Another hard game but one that is a lot of fun. Students say a manga-related word, "Naruto," for example. The next student then has to say a word that starts with the last letter of the word just said, so in this case, an "O." Whoever can't think of a word is out. 

Who Am I?

Traditional game where you stick manga titles or characters' names on the backs of students and using yes or no questions they must work out who they are. 

Zoom Manga

Easy and fun - I zoomed in on popular manga characters, printed them off and then the students had to guess who they were.