There are so many ways we can be tortured as parents. From last minute PTA requests to having to clean up bodily fluids. And then there is reading aloud from a book that was never designed to be read aloud from…..
There is a new section in the Children’s section of the library. Have you found it yet? It’s small in some libraries and quite large in others. It seems to magically draw any child over the age of three, and certainly any child who has a grasp of what books are, what they are for and their ABCs.
It can be a dangerous section, depending on your library and whether they separate the middle school years from the high school years for these types of books. And while I am okay with kids reading beyond where they are ready, especially where books are concerned, the fact that these books are so heavily illustrated leaves a lot less to the imagination.
And I get that graphic novels, this new type of book that is really just a much longer length of what we grew up with – comic books is really helpful for certain type of emerging readers. It really can help bridge that gap between the visual of the drawings and the written word of what you are reading. And so much of the storytelling is still behind one just by the illustrations in panels rather than the words.
A great cross over. Providing your child has a good grasp on the level of reading that particular graphic novel requires.
But if they don’t. If the reading is beyond them, or they found a siblings copy and they can’t even read it yet themselves, well that can lead to you having to help them.
I don’t mind helping with occasional word, or even sitting there while they sound out the words and read it aloud to me.
But when I have to read a graphic novel out loud I just want to tear my hair out. Literally, can I do anything else for you right now, scrub a toilet?
Clean up vomit?
Walk the dog?
Anything?
Because it is so hard to read a graphic novel. There are so many made up words that are just sounds that for some reason have to be shown as letters and are way more complicated than just pfft. I can be hard to know if your child is ready to move on from that panel much less that page in a timely manner, because the illustrations can be so deep.
There are often not chapters or other obvious stopping points, so you could be stuck with reading the whole book from front to back in one sitting even though they are well over 100 pages.
If you are the type of parent that skims over the truly gross, cruel or violent portions of books when you are reading them aloud to your young children, that really can not be done in graphic novels. Your child is going to know that something bad or evil is going on just by the drawings not to mention the words. And by and large graphic novels take from their comic book roots and there is a lot more violence than your average middle school aged book.
And it’s not like they come with a rating system! They aren’t rated with reading difficulty or violence level or even liberal vs conservative view points. I home-school my kids so that stuff doesn’t bother me as much because my kids will talk to me about what we are reading, what they have been reading and we will discuss things (because even their Readers books have occasionally had things in it we have had to discuss).
And it is probably no worse than the same kind of TV show. I keep my kids on a pretty tight reins for what they can watch on TV and they are girls so they aren’t even interested in watching Power Rangers, or Clone Wars (though they are amazingly quite fond of Dino Trucks and Troll Hunters), so I am not sure what the current violence levels in those books are.
And I totally understand the draw of reading a graphic novel, especially when you are bridging from picture books into chapter books without pictures. But they are so hard to read aloud, to share with another person at the same time. You can totally read it, and then have someone else read it and discuss it, but the act of enjoying them simultaneously, well maybe I am just not wired to do that?
Oh and I should throw out there, that they are usually soft sided paperback books of weird shapes and sizes which can make finding them and keeping tabs on them when they have been borrowed from the library a bit of at trick at times. And believe me you would rather not have to buy a missing graphic novel from the library, because when you eventually find it again, it will now be your copy and that means you might get asked
To Read it Aloud
Again.
Recent Comments