Every child has the potential to be a reader, but not every child sees themselves as one. So how do we bridge the gap and get every student to raise their hand when asked if they’re a reader? Often it just takes one book—the right book—to get them hooked on reading.
You know the book. The one they end up reaching for on their own, even if it takes a bit (or a lot) of prompting to get them to pick it up in the first place. The one that sparks that moment where they realize, Aha, I’m a reader. And suddenly they’ve unlocked a whole new world.
While this one special book might be different for every student, we believe there are certain kinds of books that have an even higher chance of turning striving readers into confident readers.
Enter the hybrid graphic novel. These books feature a combination of regular text and comic strip-style pages to create an accessible reading experience. Their short and quick-to-read chapters, visual cues and varied types of text make them a great choice to hook students who are less eager to read.
Hybrid graphic novels help your students achieve reading success because they:
- Aid language decoding by providing visual cues
- Guide comprehension by including pictures to help with the understanding and visualization of the story
- Provide a sense of accomplishment regularly due to short chapters that are broken up with images
- Build stamina by pushing the reader on text heavy pages and providing rest on the comic strip-style pages so they don’t feel overwhelmed
We had the pleasure of chatting with a teacher-librarian at the OLA Super Conference and she shared how she uses one of our most popular hybrid graphic novel series, the Tank & Fizz series, in her classroom. Check it out here!