St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“St. Lucy’s Home Graphic Narrative”

After reading the stories in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, students demonstrate their understanding of plot, characterization, tone, and theme by creating a graphic narrative version of scenes from the collection.

The world that Karen Russell creates in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is full of unusual and striking images. For this activity, you will choose scenes from the collection that contain particularly vivid or memorable imagery and use them as the basis of a graphic narrative project.

Your graphic narrative will juxtapose the scenes that you have chosen, using carefully selected lines of text as narrative captions, dialogue, and internal monologue to help your reader interpret your images. Your final project will:

• Present three significant scenes from three different stories
• Use the conventions of graphic narrative to accurately convey

○ Plot

○ Characterization

○ Tone

○ Theme

You can illustrate the entire story by hand if you choose, or you can utilize an online comic creation platform. For a refresher on the conventions of graphic narrative, you might review one or more of these resources:

• This 3-minute video overview of key conventions of graphic narratives
• This article and video exploring the relationship between text and image in graphic narratives
• This thorough article on “camera” conventions in graphic narratives

Teaching Suggestion: As students begin to choose scenes for this activity, you might offer some guidance about how to select scenes that will allow them to convey theme and characterization. Some scenes will work better than others for this purpose. If they are confused about how to convey the ideas required, direct them to the resources on the conventions of graphic narratives, where they can learn more about how color, line, spacing, composition, and other elements are used to convey ideas. This activity can be extended or shortened by adjusting the number of scenes required, and it can be made more challenging by adding a requirement that the chosen scenes demonstrate differing tones, themes, etc. Online comic creation platforms might suit some students; some programs offer free features.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students with attentional or executive function issues may benefit from filling in a graphic organizer comparing and contrasting tone, theme, and characterization before beginning to work on this activity. They may also benefit from storyboarding before actually creating the graphic narrative. Visually impaired students are likely to struggle with the visual aspects of this assignment; a reasonable alternative assignment is writing a description of how they imagine each scene and an explanation of how their imagined scenes demonstrate their understanding of plot, characterization, tone, and theme.

Paired Text Extension:

This activity can also be used with Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove or with Saunders’ Pastoralia.

Teaching Suggestion: If you choose to implement this activity after students have also read one or both of the other short story collections, you can modify the activity to require scenes from both (or all three) texts.