One of my favorite extracurricular clubs is our Comics Club. Graphic novels are a genre which has really gained momentum over the past few years. We see more and more quality books being published. You can read about social justice ideas, bullying, tolerance, history and even classic literature.
We have a large LEP population at our school. These books with so many visuals make comprehension as they read in English more palatable for them. It also inspires reluctant readers to read more because these are books they can really get into.
We meet once a week. We discuss stories and identify qualities of these books such as speech bubbles, narration. There are videos of authors describing how they create these stories and we have even communicated with graphic novel authors through Twitter. After we really get a feel for the attributes in graphic novels, the students write one of their own. They illustrate it on a tri-fold board and then present their story at our annual Comic-Con. It's exciting to see their ideas come to fruition. At first they want to write about Pokemon or Batman-I let them know it has to be an original story. They ended up with some very creative tales!
Now their projects this year look a bit unfinished. We meet on Fridays and we just ran out of time this year. School was closed for 2 Fridays because of holiday/bad weather day and then we also we not allowed to meet after school during STAAR testing. I would have liked to see their final projects get fleshed out a little better.
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