Expectation: Students are EXPECTED to read the book critically. When you enter the class at the beginning of the year, there will be an assessment to determine the depth of your reading and the critical thinking used to connect to the Author’s Purpose and Style, Themes, Characters, Setting, and Point of View.
Purpose: We read during the summer to ensure we cover the material necessary for the next year and beyond… What Research Says About Reading:
The following points are from “Reading In and Out of Schools,” a publication prepared by the Educational Testing Service for the U.S. Department of Education, and Patterns of Reading Practice, a publication of The Institute for Academic Excellence.
- The amount of reading that students do for school and do out of school are both positively related to their reading achievement.
- Students who reported discussing their reading had higher average reading achievement than students who reported never having this opportunity.
- When ranked according to the amount of reading they do, students in the top 5 percent read 144 times more than students in the bottom 5 percent.
Maus – November 19, 1996 by Art Spiegelman
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).
“Maus” is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.
https://www.amazon.com/
Tips:
“What is a Graphic Novel? (Part I)”: A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers: