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The graphic novel "The Great American Dust Bowl" by Don Brown pairs perfectly with our second semester reading concerning this topic, where my students are asked to determine the central idea of an informational text. After reading and analyzing the text, my students write a text-dependent analysis response to a given prompt, utilizing information from the text to support their analysis. While they are more comfortable reading and analyzing fiction writing, reading and analyzing nonfiction texts presents a challenge to many of my seventh-grade learners. Therefore, I feel this graphic novel would aid them in this process due to its format. In 2017, Edutopia listed this particular graphic novel as a "powerful graphic novel[s] for middle school." Determining a central idea using a graphic novel is an interdisciplinary, multimodal creative, interesting, visually appealing, and engaging way to share the same information while exploring a fun genre of literature that possesses much merit for my students; this type of genre also engages reluctant readers. Utilizing a graphic novel for this purpose aligns with our PA Core Standards relating to analyzing the author's craft and text structure by evaluating the author's use of graphics. I am very excited to read, evaluate, and discuss this type of genre in general, in addition to its colors, layout, format, text placement, style, and overall structure and purpose!
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