Mixed-up

by Kami Garcia

In Kami Garcia’s graphic novel Mixed-Up, illustrated by Brittney Williams, Stella struggles with reading and schoolwork while trying to understand why tasks that seem easy for others are so difficult for her. As she learns about her dyslexia, she begins to challenge the idea that difficulty with reading defines her intelligence or worth.

Big Idea

Learning differences do not determine a person’s intelligence, creativity, or value. Understanding ourselves—and receiving appropriate support—can help us replace shame with self-advocacy.

Discussion Questions

1.How do Stella’s experiences at school affect the way she sees herself? Which words or pictures help you understand those feelings?
2.What can readers learn from the difference between what other people see Stella doing and what Stella is experiencing inside?
3.How does learning about dyslexia change the way Stella understands her difficulties? What changes, and what still requires support?
4.Which responses from people around Stella are helpful or unhelpful? Use a scene to explain what meaningful support might look like.
5.How do the illustrations communicate something that the dialogue alone does not? Choose a panel or sequence and explain its effect.

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45–50 minutes📦 Copies of Mixed-Up, paper or six-panel comic templates, pencils, erasers, crayons or markers, sticky notes; optional projector, digital drawing tools, and speech-to-text.

Learning Goals

Explain how words, facial expressions, and panel sequences reveal Stella’s feelings and perspective.
Analyze how a graphic novel expands or compresses story time to emphasize an important moment.
Create a short comic using dialogue, visual details, and intentional pacing.
Distinguish a learning difficulty from a judgment about intelligence or effort.
Identify a respectful way a student can request support or respond to someone else’s needs.

Activity Steps

1.Introduce the lesson with a brief conversation about learning differences. Explain that dyslexia is a learning difference affecting reading and related literacy skills; it is not a measure of intelligence. Do not ask students to disclose diagnoses or simulate dyslexia.
2.Read a selected sequence showing Stella navigating reading or schoolwork. Invite students to notice what she says, what the pictures reveal, and where the sequence asks readers to linger.
3.Model two versions of a fictional classroom moment: one panel summarizing the event and three panels showing a pause, a reaction, and a response. Discuss how the expanded version changes readers’ understanding.
4.Have students plan a six-panel comic: establish the task, introduce a difficulty, stretch the emotional moment across three panels, and end with a specific request for or offer of support.
5.Students draw and write their comics, using simple figures if preferred. Offer prepared panel templates, a dialogue scribe, or digital tools so drawing and handwriting do not become barriers.
6.Partners read the comics and identify where they slowed down and why. Students revise one panel, then complete an exit statement explaining how their pacing helps readers understand the character.

Standards Connections

CCSS ELA RL.5.3: Compare and contrast characters, settings, or events using specific details, including how characters respond to challenges.
CCSS ELA RL.5.7: Analyze how visual elements contribute to a text’s meaning, tone, or beauty.
CCSS ELA W.5.3: Write narratives using effective techniques, descriptive details, and clear event sequences; apply these skills through a multimodal comic.
CCSS ELA SL.5.1: Participate effectively in collaborative discussions and build on others’ ideas.
SEL: Self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship skills through recognizing strengths, considering perspectives, and communicating support needs. Grade 5 ELA standards are illustrative; adjust to the class’s grade.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

Mixed-Up offers a useful study of pacing because readers encounter Stella’s experiences through two connected storytelling systems: Garcia’s words and Williams’s illustrations. Dialogue moves an interaction forward, while expressions, gestures, and the spaces between panels invite readers to infer what a character may not say. Students can investigate how a brief classroom moment gains emotional weight when they attend to both systems. The workshop’s central question is: How can a writer help readers spend time inside someone else’s experience? Select a sequence involving Stella’s reading difficulties and a sequence involving explanation or support. Compare how much story time passes, how many panels present it, and how much information readers receive through speech versus images. More panels do not automatically mean slower reading; panel complexity, text density, and reader attention also matter. In the Pace-Write-Read cycle, students first notice a craft choice, then try it in a short comic, and finally ask a partner to read the result. The aim is not to imitate dyslexia or reproduce Stella’s exact experience. It is to practice an empathetic storytelling choice: giving an important feeling enough room, then showing a concrete response rather than treating encouragement alone as a solution.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Choose a sequence in which Stella faces a literacy task and track how the panels divide the experience. Ask which moment receives the most attention and how text density, expressions, and panel transitions influence reading speed.
Plot	Map the movement from Stella’s difficulties and uncertainty toward a better understanding of her dyslexia. Distinguish events that change her understanding from events that show the continuing effects of the problem.
Prosody	Read a short exchange involving Stella aloud, using punctuation and facial expressions to guide phrasing and emphasis. Compare two respectful readings and discuss which better fits the evidence in the panels.
Word	Examine the language used to describe Stella’s difficulties and the language used to explain dyslexia. Discuss how a label can wound when it judges a person, but help when it names a need accurately.
Concept	Use Stella’s story to explore the distinction between struggling with a task and lacking intelligence. Ask students to identify a scene that makes this abstract idea concrete.
Voice & Worldview	Notice how Stella talks about herself before and after gaining a clearer understanding of her learning difference. Discuss how word choices reveal beliefs about success, belonging, and personal worth.
Point of View	Identify how the story centers Stella’s experience even when other people speak. Ask what readers understand about her feelings that another character in the scene might miss.
Setting & Place	Study a school scene and consider how its physical and social setting affects Stella. Notice how being observed, expected to perform, or given space to ask questions can change the pressure of a task.
Original Characters	Collect evidence of Stella’s interests, choices, and relationships beyond her reading difficulties. When students create characters, require an interest or strength as well as a challenge so the character is not reduced to a diagnosis.
Dialogue	Compare what Stella says with what her expression or posture suggests. Have students try a short exchange in which dialogue moves the scene forward while the art reveals an unspoken feeling.
Details	Look closely for small visual details that help readers interpret Stella’s response to schoolwork. Ask students to justify their interpretation rather than assuming every gesture has a single meaning.
Descriptions	Identify information Williams’s illustrations provide without a written description, such as location, body language, or the distance between characters. Students can replace an explanatory sentence in their comic with a purposeful image.
Firsts	Find an early moment when readers recognize Stella’s difficulty and compare it with a later moment when she understands it differently. Discuss how an initial impression creates expectations that subsequent scenes can revise.
Immediacy & Engagement	Examine how a scene places readers close to Stella’s immediate problem instead of simply explaining it afterward. Students can open their comics with a task already underway and a visible reaction.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Distinguish a fully dramatized interaction from a passage or sequence that moves quickly across events. Ask why a conversation about Stella’s needs might deserve more space than a routine transition.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Notice how uncertainty about completing a task or being understood creates tension without requiring physical danger. Track what readers hope will happen for Stella and when a scene answers—or postpones—that hope.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Check the selected pages for actual shifts in time or an unresolved ending; do not assume all three devices appear. If absent, students can discuss how recalling an earlier difficulty might change a present-day scene about Stella’s learning.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine an actual page turn or chapter ending and record what readers know before and after it. Ask whether the break delays a response, changes the setting, or gives a realization room to settle.
Pace & Creativity	Invite students to redraw the structure—not the published artwork—of a Stella scene using fewer or more panels. Compare how each version shifts attention between the task, her feelings, and another person’s response.
Play	Let students experiment with panel sizes and speech-balloon placement while keeping a short exchange unchanged. Connect this playful revision to the book’s use of words and pictures, not to pretending to experience dyslexia.
Performance	Perform a brief conversation involving Stella, pausing where the art shows a reaction. Discuss what spoken performance makes noticeable and what readers still need the illustrations to understand.
Personality	Look for a choice, expression, or line that reveals Stella as an individual rather than as a representative of all dyslexic readers. Ask students how they can communicate personality in just one panel.
Humor	If students identify a humorous exchange or image, examine how it changes the emotional pressure of nearby scenes. Make clear that humor should arise from character or situation, not from mocking reading errors or learning differences.
Pause	Find a reaction panel or a moment with little dialogue and consider what readers are invited to infer. Students can add a silent panel before their fictional character requests support.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Investigate whether a selected passage uses imagery, repetition, or figurative language to express Stella’s feelings; do not label ordinary language poetic without evidence. Students may create a metaphor for frustration or relief, while avoiding the claim that it describes everyone’s dyslexia.
Repetition	Track recurring kinds of school difficulty or repeated judgments Stella encounters. Discuss how repetition can establish an ongoing pattern rather than a single bad day.
Rhythm	Compare a sequence of short exchanges with one containing a longer explanation. Notice how alternating speech and reaction creates a rhythm that shapes the reader’s experience of Stella’s situation.
Punctuation	Inspect punctuation in actual speech balloons and explain how it guides pauses, emphasis, or uncertainty. Students can revise punctuation in one line and test whether the changed delivery fits the character’s expression.
Questions	Identify questions Stella asks or questions readers develop about her struggles. Discuss how a question can drive the plot toward understanding instead of merely supplying information.
Compare-Contrast	Compare Stella’s interpretation of a difficulty before she understands her dyslexia with her interpretation afterward. Keep the focus on changed understanding and available support rather than implying that identification instantly removes the difficulty.
Objects	Choose a school-related object visible in a scene, such as reading material, and examine its role in the action. Ask how the same ordinary object can carry different emotional significance for different characters.
Threes	Check whether a selected sequence builds through three actions or reactions; treat this as a pattern to investigate, not an assumed feature of the book. Students can try a three-panel progression of task, hesitation, and request.
Lists	Create two evidence-based lists: what readers can observe Stella doing and what they infer she may be feeling. Use the difference to discuss why outward behavior alone may not reveal a student’s support needs.
White Space & Negative Space	Inspect gutters and open areas in the artwork, considering how they separate actions or focus attention. Ask whether an uncluttered panel makes a particular expression or line stand out.
Art & Graphics	Read a short sequence once for dialogue and again for illustrations. Explain how Williams’s art works with Garcia’s writing to communicate Stella’s experience rather than merely decorating the text.
Interactives & Gamification	Use a classroom panel-matching task: students match an emotion claim to visual and verbal evidence from a selected sequence. This is an instructional adaptation, not a claim that Mixed-Up contains game features.
Placement	Trace the reading order of panels and balloons on a page involving Stella. Discuss how placement determines when readers encounter a statement, reaction, or revealing detail.
Form	Ask what the graphic-novel form lets readers understand about Stella through simultaneous words and images. Compare a short prose retelling with the original sequence to identify what each form emphasizes.
Dummy	Explain that a dummy is a rough page-by-page mock-up, then have students fold paper to plan their comic. Use it to test where a reaction, support request, or page turn should fall before producing finished artwork.
Passion	Ask which scene makes students care most about Stella being understood, and require textual or visual evidence. Connect that response to their own craft choices: what should a reader care about in their comic, and how will they show it?

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task — Give the Feeling Room. Minutes 0–4: Reread a short sequence in Mixed-Up showing Stella confronting a reading or schoolwork difficulty. Identify one place where words and pictures reveal different layers of her experience. Minutes 4–6: Discuss how a pause or reaction panel helps readers understand her; remind students that dyslexia is not a lack of intelligence. Minutes 6–13: Students make a four-panel comic about a fictional student encountering a difficult literacy task: panel 1 establishes the task, panels 2–3 stretch a moment of uncertainty through expression and a brief thought or line, and panel 4 shows a specific support request, such as asking for accessible directions or an appropriate reading tool. Allow stick figures, dictated text, or digital composition; do not require personal disclosure. Minutes 13–17: Partners read the comics and point to the panel where they lingered, explaining which visual or verbal choice caused the pause. Minutes 17–20: Students revise one panel and finish the sentence, 'I slowed this moment down so readers would understand ___.’ Connect their choices back to how Mixed-Up invites readers to understand Stella rather than judge her.

Classroom Activities

One Moment, Two Reading Speeds

Students use Stella’s experiences as a model to create a six-panel comic about a fictional student facing a difficult classroom task and asking for support. They stretch one emotional moment across several panels, then compress another moment into a single panel, showing how graphic storytelling can make readers slow down, understand a character’s perspective, and notice the importance of support. Suggested audience: grades 4–7, with drawing, dictation, and speech-to-text options.

One Moment, Two Reading Speeds

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