First Day of Comic Book Club

So, Friday the 13th (of January) was our inaugural comic book club meeting. I chose Fridays because there would be no conflict with other after school activities, but what I hadn't anticipated was the level of exhaustion I had after a very full week of school. We started out by decorating their binders' with magazine cut-outs. I am very pleased with the organization of the binders. It's split into 4 sections: writing, notes, diary, and .... After we finished decorating, we filled in the first page of the diary section as a way of community building. Then we read the first 20 pages of Lunch Lady, which the kids really enjoyed. Reading a graphic novel as a whole group posed specific difficulties given the heavy emphasis on pictures. We talked about what we were seeing and what the images made us think about but I felt bad altering the pace of their reading. Then we went back to our seats to begin brainstorming the main character of their own graphic novels that they'll be creating over the next few months. One of the things we talked about was how you needed to make your character simple enough so that you can replicate the illustration over and over, but also include a unique or distinguishing feature (big glasses, spiky hair, etc.) so that the reader can easily identify the character.

One of the observations that I remember standing out for me was how Cortez, a very introverted 6th grade boy, opened up over the course of the 2 hours.I often see him before school walking around with his nose in a book, and I rarely see him socializing with other students. Friday was no different, as Cortez chose to sit away from the main group of boys. His enthusiasm grew as the session progressed, and by the time we got to the writing portion, he was talking and exchanging ideas with Alex. He was so excited to create his own main character of a graphic novel: "Oh my gosh, this is so cool!" Enthusiasm for when we read Lunch Lady was pretty high, and it was even higher for the writing portion. I think there's something very thrilling about the act of creation. I wish we had done a better job sharing their main characters, but there'll be time for that next week I suppose.

Students who showed up: Cortez, Javan, Jaquez, Alex, Rashad, Tyshaun, Zeke, Terran,