Basic+Lesson+Plan+for+Teaching+Graphic+Novels

 When teaching a graphic novel it is first important to model how to read them. While many students do read comics, manga and graphic novels and are familiar with the text style and sequential art, others may not be so comfortable. Modeling for all students creates a common base for the student to learn from.
 * Basic Lesson Plan for Teaching Graphic Novels **

The skills that students gain from reading and analyzing graphic novels can extend to visuallization skills they will need when reading harder, more dense texts as well as with understanding and explaining the narrative within visual art.

**Lesson Activities**

As a warm-up activity you could present the students with a visual image (not necessarily from the graphic novel you are planning on reading and begin to get them in the mindset of using and reading images. n a class there are many questions that you can pose to your students to involve them in the story that the images create and get them talking about it.
 * Can you explain how the images brought you to your conclusions?
 * What does this image represent-beauty, ugliness, anger, humor, etc...?
 * How might these images impact our understanding of these feelings?

 After this type of warm-up activity you can choose a panel from your graphic novel and ask the students to go through the same types of questions.


 * What is happenig in this panel, what's the story? How do we know?
 * Is there more than one going on? How do we know?

As you reveal more of the panels you can ask them how the panels begin to interact and why they do so in the manner that they do. Additionally, the students can grapple with how the story would be altered if the panels were rearranged or if some were missing. Before moving to the graphic novel as whole you can focus on one of pages and see how a series of panels on one page tells a story. Breaking apart one of page of the graphic novel can help the students narrow their focus, explore all details of the page and exercize their interpretation skills. Active reading strategies remain as important to incorporate when reading graphic novels as they are when reading any other text. Some strategies for before, during and after reading are highlighted below. I drew from the article "Sequential Art, Graphic Novels, and Comics" By Brian Kelley for the list of strategies.

** Pre-Reading Strategies **

**Picture Walk:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Asking students to complete a picture walk through a graphic novel, even at the high school level, can help students to activate their schema or prior knowledge.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Pre-Reading Discussion:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Talking about the title, the cover, and the blurbs on the back of the book also help students to access prior knowledge.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Anticipation Guide:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Anticipation guides (which would be especially useful for nonfiction or informational graphic novels) help teachers to monitor their students’ prior knowledge.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Establishing a Purpose for Reading:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">After accessing prior knowledge, helping students to develop a purpose for reading (by using a graphic organizer such as a K-W-L Chart) encourages them to stay focused and actively read.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Pre-Teaching Important Vocabulary Words:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Like traditional books, graphic novels may feature difficult vocabulary words. Pre-teaching key vocabulary words can help students be successful with reading.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**During Reading Activities** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Reading Journals:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Asking students to complete reading journals while they read teaches them skills for note-taking. Reading journals could be composed in dialogue journal entry formats or could ask students to write down answers to specific questions. Reading journals also help students prepare for discussions about the graphic novel by asking them to record key ideas, personal reflections, quotes, questions, or points for discussion.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Sketch Responses**: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Students can also sketch reactions to the book, helping them to practice interpreting the text or conveying ideas by creating images.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Annotation:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Annotating the graphic novel (point out key ideas or literary elements) helps students to engage the text actively. They can pose questions to the author in their annotations, helping them to question why the graphic novelist employed certain techniques or pointing out discrepancies in the text. Annotation, though typically done on the pages of the book itself, can also be accomplished with post-it notes.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Questioning:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">By developing questions about the graphic novel as they are reading, students stay active in the reading process. These questions can be about character, plot, technique, etc. Students can also write down questions about ideas or concepts for which they need clarity. Asking students to compose three types of questions (literal [i.e., what happens], analytical [i.e., author technique], or global [i.e., connections to self, other books, or world events]) helps students to think about the novel more critically.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Connecting**: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Forming connections with characters, events, or scenarios while reading helps students to not only actively read the text, but to also critically respond to the text. Text-to-Self, Text-to-Text, and Text-to-World Connections can all be recorded in their reading journals.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Post Reading Strategies**

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Conferencing:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">In classrooms in which students practice Reader-Response (Rosenblatt, 1965), conferences can help teachers to monitor comprehension. After reading, a teacher can ask students to explain their response to the text as well as ask how he/she achieved that response and can intervene when students demonstrate difficulties with comprehension.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Discussion:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Asking students to discuss their responses to the text helps them to participate in communal discussion. By utilizing discussion groups, literature circles (Daniels, 1994), or Socratic seminars, teachers help students to negotiate meaning about a text. After working with a peer or small group, engaging students in whole class discussions helps the class to discuss the theme of a graphic novel, characters, plot, author technique, etc. Students can use their reading journals to ask questions, discuss connections, or raise points for discussion.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Completing graphic organizers**: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Graphic organizers such as the Venn Diagram (for comparisons), a T-Chart (for cause-and-effect or problem-solution), the K-W-L chart (Ogle, 1986), or the Comprehension Windows Strategy [Bass & Woo, 2008] for nonfiction or informational text can help teachers monitor student under standing after reading.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Creating:** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">When students create based on what they read, they are not only demonstrating that they comprehend the text, they are also reflecting on their comprehension. Asking students to create stories from other characters’ points-of-view, especially as a graphic novel, can help students think about the process of writing. Utilizing the writing process and Writer’s Workshop helps students to learn the stages of writing and the process for publication, helping them to see that writing takes time. This will also help students respect how authors, especially graphic novelists, create books. These works could then become classroom books which can be used for reading lessons. As an example, students can use the genre of Rapunzel’s Revenge (a fractured fairy tale) to write their own graphic novel about a fractured fairy tale.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">**Retellings & Assessments**: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">Retellings of a completed chapter, story, or novel, even with a graphic novel, help teachers to monitor student comprehension. Assessments such as tests and quizzes, if appropriately designed, can also help assess comprehension. Assessment of comprehension also occurs in conferences or discussions or by examining reading journals, annotations, or graphic organizers. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">(Kelley)