Graphic nonfiction novels help us understand topics by simplifying heavy topics and chopping them up into bite sized pieces. Think about this, you want to eat a chocolate bar but it's too big. A graphic novel chops the chocolate up into chocolate chips; now, it's easier to swallow. 

Once, in my class we were reading a graphic nonfiction novel on gravity, motion, and force. The graphic novel cut the topic up into a perspective that I could understand. 

If it was not in the form of a graphic novel I would imagine it would be very difficult to absorb information.

In conclusion graphic novels can help us learn difficult subjects by putting the topic into a perspective that anyone can understand.

The 4th Grade Class Remember Pencil looks like a regular broken pencil, but it is not just an ordinary broken pencil. This pencil has special powers; for example, when one of my classmates or I forget something that we want to remember, usually a question that we want to ask in class, and we hold the Remember Pencil, we often remember things that we forgot. 

The person who started the Remember Pencil, my classmate: Enzo, already seems to have these powers without even holding the Pencil. For example, when we can’t find the Remember Pencil, and someone needs to remember something, Enzo, the owner of the remember pencil, can zap the person and they will remember. But he can’t just zap them once, he has to zap them three times for them to remember their exact question. 

The Remember Pencil serves as a special instrument in our classroom; how it seems to work is a mystery. But how memory works itself is not as mysterious, as more study has been put into it. According to research at Harvard’s Bok Center: “memory gives individuals a framework through which to make sense of the present and the future. As such, memory plays a crucial role in teaching and learning.” The Center's research, there are three main processes that characterize how memory works. These processes are encoding, storage, and retrieval (or recall). 

I spoke to several of my classmates about methods they used to try and remember things. 

Some of my other classmates ask St. Anthony to pray for them to remember something they lost: either an item or a thought. The traditional prayer that goes with this rhymes: "Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, come around, something's been lost and must be found."

Some of my classmates who like to use the remember pencil method mentioned another interesting part: when you forget something, you hold the remember pencil, but your memory is still forgotten, so your memory comes out of the crack of the broken pencil. So if you ever visit the 4th grade class, and come across a broken pencil, you may have just encountered a remember pencil.