Superheroes of Literacy: Middle School's Book Week Twist

This year, the Aquinas College Middle School broke the cardinal rule of Book Week… no comic characters!

For some reason, there is a long tradition of insisting students only dress up as the characters in novels or picture books or perhaps at a stretch, biographies. We put that rule in the bin. In fact, we focussed completely on comics.

We had Marvel and DC comic writer, Shane McCarthy as our guest speaker and he ran terrific workshops with kids about creating characters and imaginary worlds. He also spoke at an assembly about the process of writing comics and how important stories and reading are in his life.

Our students dressed up as comic characters and so did our Marvel-lous staff. It was a joyful, colourful, and at times very noisy day.

You may ask, why comics? The answer is… FUN! Let’s make reading fun and accessible, meet kids where they are, and then work from there.

Plus, let me zap you with some facts…

Comics model some excellent literacy practices for readers:

• They use precise, concise, and rich language (Jaffe, 2014)• Their images support and strengthen memory recall with higher neural connections (Jaffe, 2014)• They have a high incidence of median words and rare words - higher than junior fiction and comparable to adult fiction (Center of Teaching and Learning)• They are an excellent medium to learn complex non-verbal communication (Kullberg, 2018)

KAPOW!

Linda Stade

Director of Learning Centre