Blog #4: Graphic Novels

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To be honest, I have read but am not super familiar with graphic novels, at least not as of recently. I do however think that they can be useful and beneficial for the secondary English language arts classroom. When we were children, we read pictures books which I believe kept our attention to the reading for longer. So why should this change as we get older? For example, before writing this weeks blog, I was assigned to read a graphic novel for another class. The book is titled , "American Born Chinese". To be perfectly honest, I was not super ecstatic to read yet another long book. But as it turned out (which surprised me) I not only rushed through it but also enjoyed it more than a lot of the other readings that I had been assigned previously for that class. Even though we are older and might think that we need to move on to full length regular novels, graphic novels might be needed to keep the student's attention to the reading. It probably doesn't help that I have the attention span of a fish on some select days (actually, more than I'd like to admit), but I imagine that there are a lot of others kids out there like me that need to be entertained to keep attention. What I also am learning that I love about graphic novels is that the pictures that go along with the words correlate. Like I mentioned in a past blog post, there are different types of learners. Where some students might be perfectly content just reading something and taking it in instantly (also called reading/writing learners), others are visual learners and might greatly benefit from seeing the pictures that go with the words. Graphic novels just go to show that we are never too old for a good picture book.

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