Our students enjoy graphic novels and comics. They’re fun to read. They’re also excellent practice for inference skills that all readers need to comprehend text. In fact, they rely even more on inference than regular prose because readers have to take the visual cues from the illustrations and the text cues from the speech bubbles and labels, and weave them into a full narrative. Readers of graphic novels have to fill in all the gaps that the author leaves because there’s only so much space in a comic panel. This means that their brains might be working even harder to read graphic novels than other types of books.
We have several excellent series in our graphic novel collection for elementary students. Here are a few favorites.
Squish and Babymouse, by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm.
This of course starts off the list since Squish a) won the Panda Book Award for Middle Readers this year and b) we Skyped with the authors last week. Click here to visit the Babymouse website and here to visit the Squish website.
Lunch Lady series, by Jarrett J. Krosoczka.
Ever wonder what the lunch ladies do when they’re not working at the cafeteria? The one in this graphic novel series is a super hero by night and school cook by day. Armed with superhero kitchen gadgets like a lunch tray laptop and a spatu-copter, this lunch lady will save the day over with a little help from 5 plucky students.
Owly series, by Andy Runton.
This series is almost wordless. A few sound effects are written down, but the action takes place in pictures. Dialog is rendered in symbols. Readers need to supply their own narration and figure out the meaning of the symbols. Owly is an lonely little owl who is always looking for new friends. It’s a sweet, fun read.
Amelia Rules series, by Jimmy Gownley
Amelia used to live in New York City, but after her parents’ divorce, she’s moved to a small town to live with her mother and aunt. She has had to adjust to a new life, a new school and make new friends too. The series start when she’s in fourth grade and follow her up middle school. Perfect for our own fourth and fifth graders.
While the graphic novels I’ve featured above are all series, there are also lots of good standalone titles as well. Come by the library and let us recommend a few to you. Better yet, recommend some favorite titles or series of your own. We’ll do our best to try to include them in our collection.
