I've been doing student book clubs after school for a long time. With my new principal's support I started a new club this year. I called it Comics Club and we are reading graphic novels. I love that this genre is very readable-even for our reluctant readers. I also like that there are so many girls who are brave and strong as protagonists as well.
So we meet every week, we discuss what we are reading and they check out books to read. We watched video clips with authors talking about the process of writing this genre and have even been communicating with an author. Our final goal is to do our own Comic-Con where the students will write their own stories, dress up like their main character and present a summary of their book to our school family audience.
It has just been AMAZING to watch these students who came in the first day unable to think of a single idea to write about blossom into writers! Most of the students are LEP and are not even entirely comfortable speaking and writing in English but they are doing it! Teachers are telling me that students who never wanted to read are reading these books under their desks.
I am so thankful to be at a school where ideas (even outside the box ideas are supported).
Here are some of my favorite graphic novel titles:
Are you having all students read the same book or are they reading different books and coming back to talk about them?
ReplyDeleteThat's a good question. Because we didn't have a big budget I got a variety of books that they could check out each week. I do like the idea of having them read the same book at the same time-we would just have to figure out how to do that cost-effectively. :)
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