e-future Graded Comic Readers extensive reading materials reviews
by sendaiben
11 comments
PREVIEW: Vera the Alien Hunter (Graded Comic Readers)
My students are going to love this
By the same people that brought us Magic Adventures and School Adventures (waiting for the final installment in May before I write a review), this new graded comic book series arrived yesterday. Vera the Alien Hunter is a girl with a vivid imagination. At one point she starts to meet aliens, although it is not clear if this is real or just her imagination. I have the first three volumes of the series (three stories in each): it seems there will be another three volumes, for a total of six volumes and eighteen stories.
The YL and word counts for each level are similar to the Magic Adventures comics: YL 0.5-0.9, and 300-500 words or so per story.
The Good
- Really attractive artwork and fun stories.
- The audio is very high quality
- Word counts on all the books! Well done e-future.
The Bad
- The CD is an MP3 CD, which means it doesn’t work with most of our CD players or the students’ ones at home. Pretty disappointed about this, especially as the previous comics had real CDs. Note for publishers: please use normal CDs if at all possible.
- The books have three stories in each rather than being separate books. This could be a drawback in terms of flexibility (ie more students could use them if they were one book per story).
Overall
This is a great addition to the e-future comics collection. I’m looking forward to the last three volumes and can’t wait to share them with our students (once we re-record the CDs from MP3 to audio).
e-future Graded Comic Readers EFL ES extensive reading high school junior high school kids materials readers Reading reviews
by sendaiben
25 comments
e-future Graded Comic Readers: Magic Adventures
I just received my order of a full set of e-future Graded Comic Readers (Magic Adventures) and am, so far, extremely impressed.
The series consists of 18 comic books over three levels (200, 400, and 600 headwords). The story starts off in our world, then goes into Magic Land, then comes back to the real world. The characters are children and it has a real Harry Potter kind of vibe to it. The artwork is very nice, and the production values are high. They also have exercises and a glossary in the back.
Each book has a CD (not mp3 thankfully) with various tracks: theme song, the story, listen and read, listen and repeat, key words and expressions, then a great one: read the story using prompts, making them ideal for homework or self-study.
The books are comics, so feel very fresh. The students I tried them with today (elementary and junior high school) really liked them and so did I.
This is my find of the week: great, fresh, reading material at a reasonable price (set of 18 is just over 13,000 yen before discounts).