Today is the official Free Comic Book Day at many local comics shops. Stop in to meet comic book authors and artists and to pick up some free samples.

But even better, today I heard about an amazing new resource.  Many of you already know the publishing line Toon Books, run by Art Spiegelman (Maus) and his wife Francoise Mouly.  We have many in our library and the rest on order.  Toon Books creates comic books with very simple language for emerging readers — and they definitely caught the eye of this year’s Geisel Committee!

I just learned today from The Graphic Classroom that Toon Books - the whole line - are available for full-text reading online.  A simple navigation device lets kids control the speed at which they change pages, and a “read to me” option highlights the word bubbles as they are read orally to the child.

Wait — are you a secondary librarian thinking this post isn’t for you? It is — many of these simple texts are available in other languages like Russian, Chinese, French, and Spanish — perfect as supplemental texts in world languages classes!

Click the link at the bottom below to explore.

Toon Book via kwout

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2010 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Digital Resources, Digital Audio, Web sites, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.