This section is meant to be a resource for educators, librarians, and anyone else who wants to use the Owly series of graphic novels to teach children or adults.
These lesson plans are made available for educational purposes only. Owly is suited for all ages, and these lesson plans can be adapted for use with students of all reading levels. Feel free to print out and photocopy this document as much as you’d like. Share it with anyone you wish. This is a “living” document and your feedback and input are always welcome!If you have any ideas you'd like to share or if you've used Owly in your classroom, please feel free to contact us, we'd love to hear from you!
"... let me share a typical experience I had with one of our third graders, a below-average reader named Bryonna."
"Bryonna checked out a copy of Owly, one of our most popular graphic novels, earlier in the year. She came up to me before class and held it up: 'I love this book,' she said. 'It’s my favorite book!'"
"I was thrilled and wanted to know more. “It’s a story about friendship, and there aren’t any words in the book,” she told me. “I read the story to my two-year-old sister, and she loved it, too!” “How did you read a book without words?” I asked her. Bryonna explained that when she looked at the pictures she thought about the words the characters were saying and she visualized the words in her head. Then, when she read the story to her sister, she created the dialogue and story based on the pictures."
"For a young child to read a graphic novel, much less a wordless one, many essential literacy skills are required, including the ability to understand a sequence of events, interpret characters’ nonverbal gestures, discern the story’s plot, and make inferences. Best of all, these skills don’t merely apply to Owly or to graphic novels. They are the critical skills that govern all reading comprehension, making Bryonna’s triumph with Owly into a lesson that has also helped her with other reading materials.”
“A book like Owly provides an opportunity for young children to ‘read’ the pictures in order and follow the story. They love to verbalize the story, which reinforces the concept that ink on a page can be translated into ideas and words. In addition, characters communicate using symbols, providing another opportunity for children to make the connection between abstract images and language.”
"Before a child is ready to read text, sequential art can give them practice in making meaning from material printed on a page, tracking left to right and top to bottom, interpreting symbols, and following the sequence of events in a story. Sequential art provides plenty of opportunity for connecting the story to children’s own experiences, predicting what will happen, inferring what happens between panels, and summarizing, just as you do with a text story. The advantage to sequential art is that children don’t need to be able to decode text to learn and practice comprehension skills."
"Once a child begins to decode text, the comic format enables them to be able to read much more complex stories than is possible with traditional text and illustration."