Graphic Narratives as Teaching Tools

I know for myself, I’m trying to make 49% of the book, and I want the audience to make 51%. I am more concerned about the play afterwards, what do they do afterwards, when they finish reading. Do they want to read again? Do they want to make their own stories? That’s what excites me. – Mo Willems ¹

Introduction

This unit will introduce my young students to various sentence types through the two Mo Willems book series. Willems started in 2003 with the book Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, his first picture book, for which he won a Caldecott Award. ² The story is told from the pigeon’s point of view and presented through speech bubbles, in the style of a comic book. This non-prose format is a fun way for students to follow a character’s exact thoughts and words and learn how they change throughout the story. The simple images and short, funny comments show the pigeon trying to convince everyone that while the bus driver takes a break, he should be able to drive the bus. His ever-increasing demand eventually turns into a full-blown temper tantrum, a level of frustration that young readers can understand. The series has now grown to fourteen books, which will give students a chance to see the Pigeon in many situations.³

The second series will focus on the duo of Elephant and Piggie, best friends who work on their friendship in all twenty-five books about their adventures.⁴ Again, the stories are told in graphic narrative through Elephant’s and Piggie’s conversations. Willems uses the friendship of these two characters to show young readers that many things happen between friends that can be worked out together.

Mo Willems uses his Pigeon, Elephant, and Piggie characters to tell the stories, all while allowing students to interpret and think creatively about the action and the off-page participants in each book. This empowers students to think about the stories through their own individual lenses, aligning with the reader-response theory, a literary theory that emphasizes the reader's role in interpreting a text. This perspective allows the reader to draw on personal experiences, emotions, and individual interpretations as components of understanding what they are reading, as opposed to theories that prioritize author meaning or intention.

Through the conversations and interactions between characters, students will learn the four types of sentences: statements, questions, commands, and exclamations. Students will sort, create, design, and collaborate as they learn to identify sentence types throughout the many Mo Willems books in this unit.

These two series are present in my classroom each and every year. I teach in a self-contained Kindergarten classroom at Edgewood Magnet School in New Haven. I find the neighborhood/magnet setting a rewarding environment, with students coming to school each day from a variety of home circumstances and with differences in academic levels. As a result of these variables, the children have differing levels of background knowledge and life experiences. The classroom is a mixture of varied ethnicities, economic strata, and social and emotional strengths and weaknesses. Collaboration allows all students at all levels to learn in an inherently differentiated environment, learning new concepts and experiences through hands-on practices. Throughout the school year, the Kindergarten curriculum centers on social development, literacy, and cultural awareness, which is certainly appropriate for five- and six-year-old children. Our school’s mission and vision statements focus on equity and inclusion, acknowledging and including everyone in our learning environment.  Literacy and visual literacy across genres play an important role in reading instruction in our school and district broadly. This unit on teaching sentence types through graphic narrative is in direct alignment with our school’s mission and vision.