It’s Things Like This Why I Love The Eff Out Of Maryland, My Home State

3:38 am EST May 4th, 2007 | News | 10 Comments

State urges use of comic books with lessons tailored to standards

Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck could become regulars in elementary and middle school classrooms after Maryland’s top educator encouraged teachers Thursday to use comic books to inspire students to read.

The state worked with Disney Publishing Worldwide and its educational division last year to develop a pilot project to put Mickey and Donald in eight third-grade classrooms. Disney took Maryland’s reading standards and created comics-based lesson plans, incorporating skills students needed to learn, such as how to understand plot and character.

The kids loved it, educators said.

“Reading is such an important activity for all children, and using comic book-related lessons offers teachers an important new tool to draw students into the world of words,” said state Superintendent Nancy Grasmick. “This project enhances other work that goes on in the reading class.”

Comic books and graphic novels should not replace other forms of literature, but they can be an entry point for some reluctant readers, Grasmick said.

I am a voracious reader, and in the average year I probably end up reading 40+ books and hundreds of magazines, not to mention all the stuff I read online. I would not have gotten there, I believe, if my mom hadn’t started me off by taking me to the library every Saturday (Hardy Boys!) and brining home Superman comics for me that she picked up after work.

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10 Responses to “It’s Things Like This Why I Love The Eff Out Of Maryland, My Home State”

  1. WhiteWhale says:
    May 4, 2007 at 5:54 am

    Comic books opened my eyes to the joys of reading. I suggest to my class that they read comic books because I believe it fosters good reading habits and gives them something they can lose themselves in.

  2. DN says:
    May 4, 2007 at 6:59 am

    Sounds like a nice mom.
    And a reminder to everyone, the 13th is her day.

  3. fd10801 says:
    May 4, 2007 at 7:22 am

    When I was a kid, we had something called a Bookmobile, a “trailer” tricked out to be a small children’s library. The Librarian used to remark that she looked forward to seeing the three of us every week.

    Of course, nowadays kids are treated like simpletons who can’t read “real words” so some schools are teaching kids fonetik inglish, and now here comes comic books!

    Yay! Biff! Pow!

  4. Jay says:
    May 4, 2007 at 8:35 am

    I was always taught by my parents to read what I enjoyed. My daughter takes after me and will read lots of different things. If somebody hands me a book and says, “This is good”, I’ll read it no matter what it is.

    But certain people, like my son, didn’t take to reading so fast. To encourage him to read, I started buying him basketball magazines the moment he fell in love with playing hoops. He started reading them from cover to cover.

    I’ve never understood the mentality of people who believe that kids must read certain types of books or else it will all be for nothing. Nonsense. Sooner or later people get interested in something else and they want to read about that.

  5. Rheinhard says:
    May 4, 2007 at 9:25 am

    Frank, methinks you haven’t been paying attention to the state of modern graphic storytelling. Now Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to comics as everything else, but the good stuff is really really good.

    Get the kids reading the *right* comics, and you can hook them on reading *real* books for life. Neil Gaiman’s famed “Sandman” is one of the most literate things I’ve ever read – references to everything from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll, Norse Mythology to Dante’s Inferno (with John Constantine and the Martian Manhunter thrown in for good measure). Or take “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (forget the execrable movie) – it’ll get the kids checking out: HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jules Verne. Not too bad for a funny book!

  6. Jay says:
    May 4, 2007 at 9:44 am

    I agree with Rheinhard. My son started out with basketball magazines. Lately he has been enamored with copies of Illustrated Classics books I kept from when I was 10 years old. He read ‘The Hound of The Baskervilles’ already and he’s working his way through ‘Moby Dick’ now.

  7. RedBastardGod says:
    May 4, 2007 at 9:48 am

    I never liked comic books until I started reading Jack Chick tracts. They’re a hoot!

  8. jerry says:
    May 4, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    Kim Possible on TV and then Kim Possible “Animanga” hooked my first grader on reading. Within one year she moved from beginning reader to reading Harry Potter. No shit. And then I read Harry Potter because of her.

    So Kim, Ron, Rufus, Wade, and even Drew Lipsky and She-Go “animanga” are ok with me.

  9. Duros62 says:
    May 4, 2007 at 12:20 pm

    I strongly recommend The Cartoon History of the Universe.

  10. MyPOV says:
    May 8, 2007 at 9:41 pm

    The concept of inference is found throughout every comic book. They make the concept accessible to a younger reader in an enjoyable form.