New York City, where I teach, is famous for its harbor, the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants (at least at some stages in history). Now, in my 24th year of teaching, I find myself opening my arms to a greater immigrant population than I have ever taught in our public schools. This year my Freshman English class is roughly 50% Spanish-speakers; many of them are classified as what my school calls “entering” ELLs (English Language Learners). This means that they struggle even with greetings in English.
With this in mind as we approached our first book club unit, I decided to deviate from last year’s Dystopian Book Clubs, and designed a Graphic Novel Book Club unit.
Some of the key literary structures that the previous unit covered were linear and nonlinear chronologies, symbolism and characterization. I discovered all of these techniques could be tackled in a graphic novel format. Plus, less words, more pictures and even one graphic novel in Spanish and English created even more entry points for my students.
These were the book club choices:
- Swim Team, byJohnnie Christmas
- The Golden Hour, by Niki Smith
- Enlighten Me, by Mink Lê
- Measuring Up, by Lily LaMotte
- Miss Quinces, by Kat Fajardo
- Senorita Quinces, by Kat Fajardo (Spanish)
The texts often deal with common coming of age themes–disappointing parents, staying true to yourself, conflicts with friends. The most successful part of this unit, the one that produced the most insight was symbolism, or in the case of our graphic novels, color symbolism.
Here’s my slide introducing them to three key ways color symbolism develops a story:
My native speakers were delighted to read more than one graphic novel and notice the way color tells a story or provides insight into how a character is feeling or thinking. With a quick glance at a color symbolism chart, like this one, all students were ready to hypothesize about what the color was trying to communicate. Here’s a slide of a page we looked at closely from The Golden Hour. We considered why the illustrators used black, gray and yellow:
My ELLS read Senorita Quinces in Spanish first to understand the story. Then, they looked at certain pages in the English version and considered the use of color on those pages in telling the journey of the main character. Everyone in the class wrote reading response paragraphs with some help from some sentence starters and Spanish-English glossaries. They considering the role of color symbolism in the story’s development. My ELLs leaned heavily on sentence starters for these paragraphs; check out the sentence frames I provided here.
What texts have helped you reach your own English Language Learners? I’d love to connect with you at K. A. Keener. English Teacher, New Directions Secondary School
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