When my middle school students come to the library each week, I like to pick their brains and see what they're actually reading for fun these days. It helps me keep up with what I need to have in the library collection and what I should be reading.
When I arrived at my humble little school library this year, there were no graphic novels to speak of in the collection. I decided that one of my goals as a first year librarian was to establish a graphic novel section focused at upper elementary & middle students.
They can't seem to get enough of them! Kids who never want to pick up a book jump at the graphic novel retelling of The Lightning Thief. One of my most popular offerings in the biography section is Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow.
Here's a sampling of other popular graphic novels at Carroll-Oakland's library:
- The Amelia Rules series by Jimmy Gownley
- The Bone series by Jeff Smith
- Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography
- Adventures in Cartooning by James Sturm
- The Babymouse series by Jennifer Holm
- The Amulet series by Kazu Kibuishi
5 comments:
That's a great piece of work. Motivating students to read is so great...
I think graphic novels are a great way to get young people to read. And I'm all for anything that can accomplish that!
I can't keep my Babymouse or Amulet series on the shelf at my library. I walked into the same situation. We had a few Babymouse graphic novels and a handful of graphic nonfiction, but otherwise, not a ton. So I keep building it each year and they keep going out like wildfire. :)
I love that you are making reading something students want to do. I think a lot of us did not grow up with these types of novels. I just started giving graphic novels, manga nad comic books a try and I can see why they are so appealing to younger readers.
Seriously, awesome! I'm happy to hear when kids are actually interested in reading something, anything.
I'm def going to add you to my RSS feed now that I know you have a bloggy blog :-p
-Nick Paison
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