Post-it Note Diaries

20 Stories of Youthful Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps, and Everyday Adventure
Editor/Illustrator: Author Jones
Arthur Jones had a steady desk job in an advertising office and he would frequently be bored. To help kill time he would doodle on Post-it notes. His use of drawing on Post-it notes became popular and grew into a sensation known as the Post-it Note Reading Series. People submit their stories and Jones will illustrate them on Post-it notes. After several years of holding these series with many stories and hundreds of post-it note drawings, Jones has complied a novel of some new stories, as well as his all time favorites.

Genre: Biography
Theme: Humorous Stories
Ages: 13 +

Summary: There are 20 stories in all, and each one is vastly unique from the others. There are manly stories about significant life changing or coming of age events. Some of the stories include language or material that may be a little too mature for younger audiences. Discretion should be used when choosing which of these stories to introduce to classroom students. Regardless this text should only be considered for at the very youngest, mature middle school children.
Link for Picture

Pre-Reading Activity: Have class begin discussing their prior knowledge of comics and graphic novels.  Compare different forms of comic art styles.

Post-Reading Activity: Have students create their own short story or comic using post-it notes.  This should be a small group activity with collaboration and some time, maybe a week long amount of time to work together and edit.  Each group should present their post it note comic strip to their peers.

Reflection:  What I enjoy the most is the interesting new art form of using 'doodles' on post-it notes to show one step of the story at a time. There is often only one or two short sentences used for each block of the story and one simple drawing describes the context very animatedly The language is simple and relatable and has amusing text to match, but the stories are rich and deep.  I like the idea of mixing in graphic novels with other forms of text to raise interest, promote higher levels of confidence and security in approaching text, and comparing and contrasting to learn about different forms of telling stories.