POW! Using Comics and Graphic Novels in Your Classroom

1. POW!Using Comics and Graphic Novels in Your Classroom Jennie Painter 4th Grade Language Arts and Social Studies Campobello Gramling School

2. Comics A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

3. My Roadblocks & Rationale • Roadblocks • We compete for students’ attention. • Gathering resources to teach content, are age appropriate, and motivating to read. • Personal views about literature. • Rationale • Student interest and motivation. • Content can be taught alongside the visual stimulation. • Reading strategy-visualization and inference • Bridging Literacies

4. Why use Comics and Graphic Novels? • Graphic Novels and comics appeal to a wide range of learning styles. • Graphic novels and comics are proven tools for motivating reluctant readers. • Successful reading of sequential art requires successful use of critical thinking, visual rhetoric, and deductive reasoning skills. • The National Council of Teachers of English requires that twenty-first century readers and writers need to “create, critique, analyze and evaluate multi-media texts,” as well as have the ability to “manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information.” • Quotes from website-Graphic Classroom: The power and pedagogy of comix

5. Research says… • The potency of the picture story is not a matter of modern theory but of anciently established truth. Before man thought in words, he felt in pictures... It's too bad for us "literary" enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless, pictures tell any story more effectively than words. (Sones, 1944, p. 239) • Sones, W. (1944). The comics and instructional method. Journal of Educational Sociology, 18, 232-240. • Clearly, the five identified strengths of comics - that comics is motivating, visual, permanent, intermediary, and popular - can be harnessed in practically any subject and at practically any grade level. Many innovative teachers have already done so with much success • Gene Yang, author of Comics in Education

6. Goals & Standards • According to Common Core State Standards: • Anchor Standards in Reading for K-5- • Students must integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words. • Integration of Knowledge and Ideas • RL.4.7. Make connections between the text of a story or drama and a visual or oral presentation of the text, identifying where each version reflects specific descriptions and directions in the text. • Range of Text Types for 6-12 Literature Includes the subgenres of adventure stories, historical fiction, mysteries, myths, science fiction, realistic fiction, allegories, parodies, satire, and graphic novels

7. Using Comic Strips to Teach Content- History • American History Comic Books by Joseph D’Agnese and Jack Silbert -Funny Bone Books • Set the Stage or hook. • Reinforce or review • Pilgrims of Plymouth, Boston Tea Party, Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, The Lewis & Clark Expedition, California Gold Rush

8. Possible Mentor Text Sets • Primary (K-3): Benny and Penny, Baby Mouse, Chicken and Cat, Oops, Tuesday, Magic School Bus, Picture Book Biographies, If You Lived When…, • Elementary (4-6): Lightening Thief, Artemis Fowl, Dear Dumb Diary, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Bone, Smile, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Foiled, Laika, American Born Chinese • Middle / JH: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, To Dance, The Arrival, Maus I & II • Any classic novel in graphic form- Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Frankenstein, Call of the Wild, Black Beauty

9. Genre Study: Comics and Graphic Novels • Introduction text Class noticings • Structure • Punctuation • Text features • Craft • Close Study- Graphic Novels • Mini-lessons: quotation marks to dialogue balloons; inferred action (when to leave out the words); comic text structures

10. Noticings- Graphic Novels • Colors • Storyboard for a video game • Pictures add meaning • Onomatopoeia • Don’t have to be read cover to cover, episodes • Story told through dialogue • Cliffhangers

11. Into the Social Studies Class akaWriting under the Influence • After studying the genre, now it is time for students to ‘write under the influence’. • Background content on the American Revolution has been taught, now for the project assessment. • Students, in groups of 3, will create a comic strip of 5 to 8 panels to illustrate a major event from the unit. • Students choose an event from the time period and research if needed. • Groups then decide what they want to include in the panels: characters, props, background, dialogue, and captions. • In the computer lab, groups will publish their comic strip. • Make Beliefs Comix - www.makebeliefscomix.com/ • ToonDoo -www.toondoo.com • Strip Generator - stripgenerator.com/strip/create/ • Write Comics – www.writecomics.com/

12. Sources • Sones, W. (1944). The comics and instructional method. Journal of Educational Sociology, 18, 232-240. • Gene Yang, author of Comics in Education • www.geneyang.com/comicsedu/index.html • “Teaching Early Readers Comics and Graphic Novels” by Katie Monnin • “Using Graphic Novels in the Classroom” by Melissa Hart • Gretchen E. Schwarz ‘Graphic Novels for Multiple Literacies’ Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. November 2002