Students should be mostly (or completely) done with their independent novels today. I gave a short amount of reading time at the start of class for those that aren’t. For those that are, I provided the prompt for the power paragraph you will start next class:
Looking at the protagonist in your novel, how does he/she go against the norms of his/her society or community?
I asked students to a.) copy this down, b.) identify their protagonist, usually the main character, and c.) begin a list of norms in the society or community of the protagonist. After talking about independent novels, we switched back to graphic novels. I reviewed a little bit the material we covered a week ago, and I also passed out a handout with some additional information about reading visual texts. We finished talking about the chapter from Maus we started last week. And then students practiced using all of these reading strategies while trying to reconstruct a cut-up copy of the second chapter of Persepolis — “The Bicycle” — which we briefly discussed at the end of class. Homework: please finish your novel and prepare for writing the power paragraph next class.
