Brace Face

Smile was a scary relatable, and I could see it being relatable to kids as well.

This story is about Raina going through unfortunate struggles of being a middle schooler–from getting her teeth knocked out, to braces, to first crushes, to losing and gaining of best friends. This book is so hilarious and real. I was getting flash backs of my brace face days and awkward crushes.

It’s a book that shows that things like what Raina goes through, happens to everyone even though at the time you might feel alone. I just wanna hand it to every kid going into middle school/transitioning to high school to show them everything is gonna be okay, despite how awful it may seem in the moment!

Being a graphic novel, I think this book is great to give to a kid who may not like reading or someone who isn’t a confident reader. It is a short read, and doesn’t even feel like you are reading a “real book” but in fact you are. The pictures throughout the whole book give a great sense of the character and match the emotions of the text.

One thing about graphic novels is that you can’t create your own world of characters and scenery, which kind of ruins the fun of having your own imagination. It’s almost like reading a book and then going to see the movie–things don’t match up the way you created it.

But it is still cool to be able to have pictures to go along with the words as a visual, especially for kids that can’t paint their own pictures in their heads.

Following reading this book, I think it would be fun for students to create their own pages to a graphic novel/their own comics. It would give them a chance to be creative and create illustrations to go along with their words.

I also found two sites that had lesson plans people created to go along with this book that I thought were cool:

http://cbldf.org/2013/12/using-graphic-novels-in-education-smile/

http://www.scholastic.com/graphix_teacher/pdf/Scholastic_GrphxWebCast_RTelgemeier.pdf