Annabelle Taylor Blog 6: “Graphic Novels: There’s More to it than Meets the Eye”
1) When I first visited the “Diamond Bookshelf” site I was a little skeptical. At a first glance I thought the content would be too mature for young children like I hope to teach someday. However, once I explored it further, I was able to find that it holds a lot of wonderful and incredibly useful tools I could use in a classroom. There is a whole page that has lesson plans specifically for primary school aged children. The lesson plans are creative and relevant. They also target some specific novels which could be very helpful for someone like me who has not experienced a lot of graphic novels. It can help give me an idea of what books might be good to use in a classroom based on their relevancy and attention to detail in the lesson plans presented. This resource is also updated regularly with reviews and upcoming release dates which can help teachers stay on top of what is currently “in”.
2) Pashmina, by Nidhi Chanani, is a graphic novel that enters around a young Indian-American girl named Priyanka. Like many teenage girls, Priyanka is struggling to find herself in the world despite constant pestering from mean girls and a loving, if not somewhat overbearing mother. Priyanka knows her family comes from India, however she has never known her father or been to the country. This creates a sense of longing within her to know where her roots lie and what life is like there. One day, she finds a pashmina tucked away in one of her mother’s trunks, and when she tries it on it transports her to the India she has always imagined. The world she sees is wonderful and exciting…and not entirely accurate. Priyanka soon learns that not everything is what you may dream it to be, but you can still find beauty and hope in dark places.
Throughout Pashmina, Priyanka sees a ghostly figure during her imaginary travels to India. The figure only appears briefly before it is quickly shooed away by the bird and elephant guiding Priyanka through the ideal India. This is an example of foreshadowing used in this novel. From the first time you witness this ghost, you know it holds significance to the story, but you are not sure what until the end of the book. By using this literary device, the author makes sure to focus your attention on the significance of that part of the novel. It is a fairly big clue that there is more to that can be read into the story whenever this figure appears.