Help me give my students the start of the One Piece and My Hero Academia manga series. Manga encourages and supports unimpressed and struggling readers. Help us help students learn to enjoy and feel good about their reading.
Literacy is an essential skill impacting everything our students do including school assignments, filling out job applications, scanning announcements, or reading manuals. In the past few years, we have observed a dual increase in the number of struggling readers and the number of students asking for manga. We realized this is an opportunity to support our students who struggle with reading, but we need help to do so.
For some students manga is an opportunity enjoy reading for the first time.
For other students manga is a type of gateway book allowing them to build a willingness to read, confidence in their skills, and flexibility to expand into other types of books. Manga is something that draws readers who don’t see themselves as such but are interested enough to work at reading these books.
These students may struggle, but they try and they are interested. Having choice, and access to books like manga, is essential to helping them identify as readers and improve their overall literacy. Angie Thomas, author of The Hate You Give, said in an interview that she hears this from teens, “I hate reading but I read your stuff in a day.” Thomas responds with “I have to tell them, 'you don’t hate reading, you hate what you’ve been forced to read.'” One way for us to support what Thomas refers to as our “struggling and unimpressed readers” is to offer them access to different types of books, books they are interested in. The goal for this project is to engage struggling and unimpressed students by providing access to manga to help encourage reading and literacy skills.
Manga provides an opportunity to increase interest, confidence, opportunity, and skills for our struggling readers. Please help us to help our students.
More than a third of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Alexis Baker and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.