Manga/Anime Comic Books for reading

http://steckvaughn.hmhco.com/en/impact.htm

I recently read an article in an education magazine that I get that talked about boys and reading.  This article talked about how boys can enjoy reading if we allow them to read what they desire.  For instance, last semester in my first field experience, I worked with a gal who had a learning disability who was really into anime.

If her teacher gave her Old Yeller to read, she might not have gotten into it.  However, if the teacher gives her a series of books like this, I think that she would be enthralled and fall over reading because it is anime/manga.

So, what I want to talk about is how we need to accept our students interests, whether we find those interests interesting or not.  For instance, last semester, during another field experience that I had, I had a 10 year old boy who really adored tanks.  I wanted to get him a book about tanks when the teacher told me that that was inappropriate.  Subsequently, he never read during the reading time and would get yelled at by the teacher.

If we don't teach to their interests, then we, as teachers, are screwing up.  If they are into something like tanks, we can use tanks to teach mathematics, reading, grammar.  Here are a few examples of how you can use tanks for mathematics.

Ask the student to draw a picture of a tank with however many wheels they want to draw.  They draw a tank with 10 wheels.  You cut the tank in two (draw a line through it) and tell them that you just halved the tank.  So how many wheels are there now?  Then write the equation 10 (the wheels started out with) divided by 2 (you divided the tank into two).

You can give a kid a book and help them get into reading.

Grammar is an interesting one because you can have a bunch of matchbox car tanks.  Show them one and ask them what this is.  They will respond with the answer, a tank.  Then you bring another tank and ask them what they are and they may respond tanks.  You can use them to show that plurals have the morpheme "s" to show that they are plural.  You can then begin to branch out and ask them to say "this tank" and then what the plural to that statement is "these tanks."

So, we teachers need to show the students that we truly care about them and we can do this by incorporating what they are interested in into our curriculum.  It takes work and energy to try and assess what their interests are and then figuring out how to incorporate it into the lesson plan.  But we are teachers and this can help our students succeed where a traditional workbook approach doesn't.