Scholastic’s first manga, Unico: Awakening, can help fuel your students’ love of reading in a brand new way.
While your students may not yet be familiar with this medium, if they love favorite anime series like the Pokémon adventures, Sailor Moon, or Dragon Ball, they’ll enjoy reading and exploring manga titles.
Kid-friendly manga offer a great way to sharpen your students’ reading skills and introduce them to more complex reading concepts, new art styles, and more.
However, while manga may appear to be similar to graphic novels, it also differs in a number of ways that change the overall reading experience for your students, which will entice them to want to read more.
Why Should Kids Read Manga?
First, the formatting of Japanese-style manga offers readers a more challenging way of consuming their stories.
Manga is a visual medium, which helps kids develop their visual literacy, as well as their vocabulary skills due to manga’s use of advanced words.
Another crucial way that manga differs from typical graphic novels is its very distinct art styles. Manga illustrations often place a heavier emphasis on drama. The artwork in manga can deepen a reader’s understanding of the text or provide context clues for unfamiliar words or concepts.
While manga is available in all kinds of genres — think fiction, adventure, sci fi, short stories, horror, romance, and more — it tends to have more mature storylines that deal with complex subject matter that is often filled with nuance and symbolism.
Often told through the characters’ first-person narrative, manga plot lines also have a heavier emphasis on dialogue driving the story along.
Get Started Reading Manga With Unico
Readers in grades 3-7 will love Unico: Awakening, slated to hit shelves on August 6.
The first installment in this thrilling series tells the story of Unico, a young unicorn who, after enraging the evil goddess Venus, is banished from the heavens and forgets everything he was.
Saved by the kindhearted West Wind, Unico continues to help others, before having to escape Venus again and begin a new adventure. Your students will find this book hard to put down, but along with being a page turner, Unico also opens the door to conversations and insights about our complex world.