Spiral-Bound

I’m quite embarrassed to admit that when assigned to read a graphic novel for this week, I had to go online and actually look at what a graphic novel was. When I finally looked over some websites to get a gist of what they were, I was very excited to read the comic-like book because from what I can remember, I’ve never read one before I was eager to see what they were all about.
I found the graphic novel Spiral-Bound by Aaron Renier and I obviously found it very different than any other novel I’ve ever read before, but I really liked it! Renier used a notebook format to his book-he actually made the different strips on notebook paper which I thought was great. The main characters are all animals (elephant and a dog) and through his black and white (but very detailed!) pictures, we are taken through the main character, Turnip’s journey through “sculpture camp”. The story was definitely original and imaginative but I found it a little hard to follow at some points. I noticed that these types of novels are a little more difficult to get used to, for I’m used to just reading and not looking at the pictures, but I realized looking at each picture after reading the text in it makes it easier to get to know which characters is which and know every little detail that is occurring.
I’m looking forward to incorporating graphic novels into my future classroom, especially for the younger aged students. The novels are great for increasing the reading comprehension and vocabulary of readers who may not want to read your traditional classroom text, which I’m sure is a problem I am going to run into in my future classroom.