Comics in Education Presents: Great Ideas for Teaching Graphic Novels from Colleen Graves!

by Glen Downey, Comics in Education, www.comicsineducation.com

If you teach with comics, be on the lookout for great resources like this one!

We are lucky to be educators at a time when sharing valuable resources is so easy. Here is a great blog post from Colleen Graves, entitled "Graphic Novels in the Classroom." It examines approaches to teaching a variety of graphic novels, like Maus, Persepolis, and The Arrival. There are also a host of links that Colleen has shared, so be sure to check those out as well!

The post focuses on a range of different activities, including those that allow students to take old stories and adapt them to a new setting, as in Colleen's idea for using fairy tales to this end: 

I love how complex Jack and the Beanstalk became simply by changing the setting and modifying the characters. I’d like to share this with my students and then have them create their own fractured fairytale graphic novels in groups.  Each group could have an art director, author(s), artist, and pencil artist. Groups would be given fairytales, settings, and character ideas and then they could work together to create their mash-up masterpiece!

Over the coming months, I'm hoping to gather and identify as many useful resources as this one from Colleen and share them with you. If you're looking on our site for classroom ideas, check out the activities tab or click the image below!

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