Sky – My daughter’s Superhero

A couple of terms ago, my eldest daughter came home from school saying that she was learning about Superheroes. My first thought was a rather petulant ‘why didn’t I get to learn about superheroes at school?’, followed by a ‘why on earth are they learning about superheroes in the first place and, oh God, which ones?’

Not only did I foresee a bloodbath as the children faced each other down, warring in a Lord of the Flies manner over whether DC or Marvel produced the best heroes (it turns out neither of them do, you’ll see why below), I was also worried as to which heroes they would actually learn about.

Batman? God no! He’s not so bad as he doesn’t use guns and generally ‘just’ beasts the bad people up. the bad people however, are truly bloody awful and would give my precious daughter nightmares for the rest of her life. That’s what I like to think anyway.

Kiss Ass? He does what’s right, no matter the price he pays, only his world is inhabited by ‘real’ people who are just as awful as the Joker, and sweet little girls go around dropping the c-bomb and making their elders drop their guts – literally.

Superman? Probably a good one. Only he’s just so damn perfect. Nothing, bar some rare mineral that can only be found on earth as the result of a meteor strike (there do tend to be a lot of them, however), can hurt him and he doesn’t age.

Spawn? No. Move swiftly on.

Punisher? See above.

X-Men? Potential. Until Wolverine makes his enemies spill their guts during questioning. Literally.

So, you can see my dilemna. My daughter is going to be exposed to superheroes and will therefore become even more of a fantasy geek than she already is. Awesome. But which superheroes and how are the teachers going to gloss over all the angst  and foibles that these superheroes have?

Simple. They got them to make up their own! They had to make up backgrounds, work out their super-powers, draw a picture, make a model and do a short animation! Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to see the animation.

 As you can see, Sky has a decent taste in clothing. The ‘w’ as looks on her forehead is actually a double S, with the left one reversed.

Her powers are those of the weather. Sky can call upon any form of weather in order to help herself and battle baddies. By this I mean that she can make is incredibly hot, or freezing cold, snow, rain, hail, blow a gale etc. All this and my daughter hasn’t seen any superhero films.

The way that they had the children make the models is really clever. The legs and head are actually the top and bottom of  a clothes-peg. Ingenious. The body and hair are plasticine, and the face mask is drawn on with felt-tip.

If this is the sort of thing that schools are doing now, I heartily approve as it helps stimulate the minds of all the children in such a way that they forget they’re learning, and hopefully gets them into reading about and watching superheroes at an age when it’s suitable.