Library News

Thank you to all the students who have been borrowing so consistently. It has been such a pleasure seeing everyone in library lessons.  Please don’t forget to remind your children to bring their library bags every week. 

If children have not finished a book and would like to re-borrow it, please still have children return their book on their library day so it can easily be reborrowed for another week.  Attaching a post-it note to the book indicating child’s name and class makes reborrowing a very simple process. 

Graphic Novels

Children are increasingly interested in reading graphic novels, and rightly so, they are fun, visually appealing, and easy to read.  And they are here to stay because children just love them and whatever gets your child turning a page, must be a win. 

A graphic novel is essential the old-fashioned comic. There are varying styles of graphic novels also, but all are very popular with our students.   Many parents would have grown up reading Asterix or TinTin, which are a type of graphic novel.  Today children love Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Captain Underpants and Dog Man.  These are also a style of graphic novels. The Baby-Sitters Club, now in graphic format, do not even make it back to the shelves before they are borrowed again – equally popular with the boys as well as the girls. 

We know that graphic novels are especially beneficial to struggling or reluctant readers, as well as English-language learners. These books also offer all readers a way to practice important reading skills such as building vocabulary, understanding a sequence of events, discerning the plot of a story, and making inferences. Alcomics give young readers training in visual literacy — helping them read and interpret images — an essential skill in our highly visual world.

We are getting more and more graphic novels in the library and now many popular and classic books are coming out with new editions in graphic format.  ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ has a graphic edition as does Roald Dahl’s ‘Witches’.  With such achievements and the soaring popularity of comics and hybrid books among young people, publishers have rushed to establish new imprints and sign new comics creators to fill the demand.

The kids are on board with comics, and so are many publishers, librarians, and teachers. We should also remember; comics are not intended to replace prose. They are just one way to tell a story. But they can be as demanding, creative, intelligent, compelling, and full of story as any book.

I do not have a dedicated Graphic Novel section or location, but rather am integrating them on the shelves amongst the Junior and Senior Fiction books.  In this way, children still need to locate the book on the shelf. This also ensures children are seeing other titles and traditional texts.  Also, I am encouraging students to ‘read the graphic and then read the original text’, a bit like ‘seen the movie, now read the book’.  In this way, I am hoping that graphic novels will serve the purpose of engaging children and encouraging them to want to read.  In this world of many distractions and fast paced activities it can only be a good thing. 

Happy Reading

Mrs Vassila - Teacher Librarian