Reading a comic aloud

Narration boxes, the rectangles at the top or bottom of a panel, are the storyteller's voice: Meanwhile, back at school. They often hold the longest sentences on the page, so they are the grown-up's job. Speech bubbles are the characters talking. They are short, they sit next to a face in the picture, and they are the child's. Sound words go to whoever shouts them first.

For a new reader, give them one character. For a confident reader, give them every bubble and keep only the boxes. Swap halfway through the book so both of you get the best lines.

A voice for each character makes it easier to follow who is speaking, and it is more fun. The pictures tell you how to say it: a big spiky bubble is a shout, small letters are a whisper, a wobbly bubble is someone scared. Ask your child how a character would sound before they read the line. Reading with feeling is a real reading skill, and comics hand you the stage directions.

If your child gets stuck on a word, point at the picture first. Often the face or the action gives the meaning, and the word follows. If it doesn't, say the word and move on; a comic read aloud should keep its pace. Come back to the tricky word at the end if your child wants to.

Big, busy pages with lots of small bubbles are tiring. Take those together, one bubble each, pointing as you go.

Before a new book, look at the cover and the first page and guess what will happen. After, go back to a favourite panel and read it again in the silliest voices you can manage. Asking which panel was the funniest, and why, is a question about the story that never feels like a test.

Short sessions beat long ones. A chapter a night, ticked off on the series page's checklist, gives a child something to look forward to and a record of how far they have come.

Once a book is a favourite, try acting a page out. Each person takes a character, you read the boxes as the narrator, and anyone free does the sound words. Children who are shy about reading aloud are often happy to read a line in a dragon's voice. It is still reading, and they will want to do the next page.

These series have short bubbles, going by the line on each series page, which makes them good for sharing:

• Pizza and Taco, ages 5–8: Big panels with a line or two of speech in each bubble, split into short chapters.
• Dog Man, ages 7+: Short speech bubbles in big comic panels, with a joke on most pages.
• Lunch Lady, ages 7–10: Short comics with a lot of white space, a few words per bubble and one joke after another.
• Chi's Sweet Home, ages 8–12: Mostly pictures, with a few words in each bubble, in short scenes of one to a few pages.
• Cat Kid Comic Club, ages 7+: Comics inside a comic: short bubbles, and each kid's comic in the book is drawn a different way.