Grades
PreK - 12
The Best Manga Books for Kids
Introduce your students to a brand new world of books and characters through this fun medium.
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.
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.
Readers in grades 3-7 will love Unico: Awakening! 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.
Meanwhile, graphic novels are a great way to bring a whole new world of books to all kinds of readers.
Check out favorite graphic novels for striving readers.
Graphic novels combine compelling, visual storytelling with advanced vocabulary and literary concepts that appeal especially to striving readers.
Shop graphic novels your students will love below! You can find all books and activities at The Teacher Store.
These delightful new graphic novels capture the everyday-and unexpected-ups and downs of a fourth-grade classroom.
Paperback Book
Clementine Fox and the Great Island Adventure: A Graphic Novel (Clementine Fox #1)
Meet Clementine Fox, Professional Amateur Adventurer!
A semiautobiographical middle-grade graphic novel about frenemies, fitting in, and finding your voice.
Can two kids save the world and work their family food truck?
In this true coming-of-age story, Rex has his sights set on surviving sixth grade, but now he's got to find a way to do it with glasses, no friends, and a family that just doesn't get it!
What Danny really needs is a new best friend! So after she inherits a magic sketchbook from her eccentric great-aunt in which anything she sketches in it comes to life, she draws Madison, the most amazing, perfect, and awesome best friend ever. The thing is, even when you create a best friend, there's no guarantee they'll always be your best friend. Especially when they discover they've been created with magic!
Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter have once again teamed up to tell a funny, heartfelt, and charming story of family, friendship, and growing up.
Instagram sensation and Tapas webcomic superstar Cassandra Calin makes her long-form debut with this funny, feel-good middle-grade graphic novel about change.
This Breakfast Club-inspired graphic novel in Spanish and English text pairs together with an engaging storyline centered on middle school friendships and identity.
From New York Times bestselling author Gale Galligan comes a funny and vibrant semi-autobiographical middle-grade graphic novel about friendship and belonging.
Do you have what it takes to be a student at the academy for Roblox pros? Introducing the first book in an unofficial Roblox graphic novel, Academy for Roblox Pros!
Purportedly drawn by the main characters of Pilkey"s hit, Captain Underpants, this wildly popular series features a half-canine crime fighter; his arch rival, Petey the Cat; Petey's good-hearted clone; a devoted robot; and...you really just have to read it.
Harriet the Spy meets Front Desk in this funny, surprising graphic novel by Booki Vivat, author-illustrator of the New York Times bestselling Frazzled series.
Bay Ann doesn't think she's a star--she knows it! Now how does she prove it to the rest of the world? This is a hilarious graphic novel about friendship, fame, and fighting for control of your own story, perfect for fans of Nat Enough, Click, and Invisible.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad Guys comes another hilarious illustrated series starring a pampered cat who is way tougher than anyone realizes.
Anang, an Indigenous, two-spirit kid, is nervous to wear a skirt to the upcoming powwow, afraid of what others will think. Will they find the confidence to follow their heart?
In a beautifully crafted and captivating graphic novel from award-winning writer Sherri L. Smith and Eisner-nominated artist Christine Norrie, a Japanese-American girl must survive years of uncertainty and questions of loyalty in Hiroshima during World War II.
