35th Annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Nominee! This text will allow you to harness students’ love of comics and graphic novels while increasing critical thinking and engagement in the classroom. Author Tim Smyth offers a wide variety of lessons and ideas for using comics to teach close reading, working with textual evidence, literature adaptations, symbolism and culture, sequencing, essay writing, and more. He also models how to use comics to tackle tough topics and enhance social-emotional learning. Throughout the book, you’ll find a multitude of practical resources, including a variety of lesson plans—some quick and easy activities as well as more detailed ready-to-use unit plans. These thoughtful lessons meet the Common Core State Standards and are easy to adapt for any subject area or grade level to fit into your curriculum. Add this book to your professional library and you’ll have a new and exciting way of reaching and teaching your students!

Engage even the youngest readers with Dr. Monnin's standards-based lessons and strategic approach to teaching comics and graphic novels to early readers! Examples from a wide variety of comics and graphic novels--including multicultural models--and recommended reading lists help teachers of grades K-6 seamlessly teach print-text and image literacies together. Teaching Early Reader Comics and Graphic Novels shows you how to address the unique needs of striving readers, connect reading and writing, teach the necessary terminology, and apply the standards to any graphic novel or comic for emerging through advanced readers. A companion blog, www.teachinggraphicnovels.blogspot.com, offers free downloads, teaching tips, and updates on new comics and graphic novels you can use in your classroom. Tap into the power of comics and graphic novels to engage all learners!

Harness the power of graphic novels to promote literacy and engage all secondary students with Teaching Graphic Novels by Katie Monnin! Address print-text and image literacies, from navigating text features to creating standards-based lessons on reading comprehension, fiction/nonfiction, written response, critical thinking, and media literacy. Complete with examples from graphic novels, professional resource suggestions, strategies that can be used with any graphic novel, cross-indexes of middle and high school graphic novels and themes, reproducibles, and extra support for English-language learners. Teaching Graphic Novels was a finalist for both the 2009 ForeWord Education Book of the Year and the 2010 AEP Distinguished Achievement Award in the 6-8 Curriculum and Instruction category!

Comics have gone from "scourge of the classroom" to legitimate teaching tools, and the Common Core State Standards for scholastic achievement now explicitly recommend their use in the classroom. Reading With Pictures: Comics That Make Kids Smarter unites the finest creative talents in the comics industry with the nation's leading experts in visual literacy to create a game-changing tool for the classroom and beyond. This full-color volume features more than a dozen short stories (both fiction and nonfiction) that address topics in Social Studies, Math, Language Arts, and Science, while offering an immersive textual and visual experience that kids will enjoy. Highlights include George Washington: Action President by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, Doctor Sputnik: Man of Science by Roger Langridge, The Power of Print by Katie Cook, and many more. Includes a foreword by Printz and Eisner Award-winning author Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese, Boxers and Saints). A downloadable Teachers' Guide includes standards-correlated lesson plans customized to each story, research-based justifications for using comics in the classroom, a guide to establishing best classroom practices, and a comprehensive listing of educational resources.

Secondary language arts teacher Maureen Bakis shows how to engage adolescents by using graphic novels to teach 21st-century skills, improve reading comprehension, and promote literacy learning.

A collection of nine essays that describes strategies for teaching visual literacy by using graphic novels, comics, anime, political cartoons, and picture books.

Sequential art combines the visual and the narrative in a way that readers have to interpret the images with the writing. Comics make a good fit with education because students are using a format that provides active engagement. This collection of essays is a wide-ranging look at current practices using comics and graphic novels in educational settings, from elementary schools through college. The contributors cover history, gender, the use of specific graphic novels, practical application and educational theory. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Comic books and graphic novels, known collectively as "graphica," have long been popular with teenagers and adults. Recently graphica has grown in popularity with younger readers as well, motivating and engaging some of our most reluctant readers who often shun traditional texts. While some teachers have become curious about graphica's potential, many are confused by the overwhelming number of new titles and series, in both fiction and nonfiction, and are unsure of its suitability and function in their classrooms. Drawing on his own success using graphica with elementary students, literacy coach Terry Thompson introduces reading teachers to this popular medium and suggests sources of appropriate graphica for the classroom and for particular students. Taking cues from research that supports the use of graphica with students, Terry shows how this exciting medium fits into the literacy framework and correlates with best practices in comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency instruction. Adventures in Graphica contains numerous, easy-to-replicate, instructional strategies, including examples of how graphic texts can be used to create a bridge as students transfer abstract comprehension strategies learned through comics and graphic novels to traditional texts. Adventures in Graphica provides a roadmap for teachers to the medium that the New York Times recently hailed as possibly "the next new literary form."

Graphic novels are now appearing in a great variety of courses: composition, literature, drama, popular culture, travel, art, translation. The thirty-four essays in this volume explore issues that the new art form has posed for teachers at the university level. Among the subjects addressed are•terminology (graphic narrative vs. sequential art, comics vs. comix)•the three outstanding comics-producing cultures today: the American, the Japanese (manga), and the Franco-Belgian (the bande dessinée)•the differences between the techniques of graphic narrative and prose narrative,and between the reading patterns for each•the connections between the graphic novel and film•the lives of the new genre's practitioners (e.g., Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar)•women's contributions to the field (e.g., Lynda Barry)•how the graphic novel has been used to probe difficult moments in history (the Holocaust, 9/11), deal with social and racial injustice, and voice political satire•postmodernism in the graphic novel (e.g., in the work of Chris Ware)•how the American superhero developed in the Depression and World War II•comix and the 1960s counterculture•the challenges of teaching graphic novels that contain violence and sexual contentThe volume concludes with a selected bibliography of the graphic novel and sequential art.

Contributions by Bart Beaty, Jenny Blenk, Ben Bolling, Peter E. Carlson, Johnathan Flowers, Antero Garcia, Dale Jacobs, Ebony Flowers Kalir, James Kelley, Susan E. Kirtley, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, John A. Lent, Leah Misemer, Johnny Parker II, Nick Sousanis, Aimee Valentine, and Benjamin J. Villarreal More and more educators are using comics in the classroom. As such, this edited volume sets out the stakes, definitions, and exemplars of recent comics pedagogy, from K-12 contexts to higher education instruction to ongoing communities of scholars working outside of the academy. Building upon interdisciplinary approaches to teaching comics and teaching with comics, this book brings together diverse voices to share key theories and research on comics pedagogy. By gathering scholars, creators, and educators across various fields and in K-12 as well as university settings, editors Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson significantly expand scholarship. This valuable resource offers both critical pieces and engaging interviews with key comics professionals who reflect on their own teaching experience and on considerations of the benefits of creating comics in education. Included are interviews with acclaimed comics writers Lynda Barry, Brian Michael Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David Walker, as well as essays spanning from studying the use of superhero comics in the classroom to the ways comics can enrich and empower young readers. The inclusion of creators, scholars, and teachers leads to perspectives that make this volume unlike any other currently available. These voices echo the diverse needs of the many stakeholders invested in using comics in education today.