When I was first asked to teach a group of students how to properly read a graphic novel, I wasn't quite sure what to teach them. But as I began to research the topic, I realized that students who have never read a graphic novel or comic book could easily be confused by panels, thought bubbles, or dialog bubbles that do not always follow our traditional straight lines of left to right text. Get Graphic, a website created by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Libraries along with their partners, offered a lot of help on the topic:
http://www.getgraphic.org. These fantastic librarians put together an easy-to-follow guide on how to properly read a graphic novel, along with definitions for terms, and examples of pages. I uploaded some of these materials into Nearpod and created interactive activities in which students had to number dialog bubbles to demonstrate their knowledge of how to read a graphic novel page. After the lesson, several students ended up checking out graphic novels from the library, so I was excited to be able to introduce this genre of literature to students. I was especially excited to see how engaged some of the boys in the English classes were in the novels they were reading. Some started side-conversations about funny moments in the text or neat illustrations that they wouldn't normally see in their required reading. I hope I have the opportunity to teach similar lessons to this one in the future, as the students were engaged and excited about what they were reading! Additionally, as someone who rarely reads graphic novels, I learned a lot and was even inspired to read one of the graphic novels I had just purchased for the library.
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| Students number panels to demonstrate understanding of how to read a graphic novel. |
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| Students answer brief questions about the experience of reading a graphic novel |
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