Lesson Plan: Love Volume 2 The Fox

Review

A breathtakingly gorgeous and wordless graphic novel, Love: the Fox offers young adult and adults readers one of the most intriguing and literary-level stories of the year.

The guiding question may be familiar. The answer, however, may not be so familiar: So, if a tree (or any other element of nature) experiences an action does anyone or anything else even notice? Brrémaud and Bertolucci’s Love: the Fox makes a more than convincing claim that the answer is a resounding “Yes!” In fact, everything takes notices. If an element of nature experiences a transitional action the land and the sea notice. So do all of the animals.

Sure to leave a memorable impression with its message about the impact of any action and /or reaction this graphic novel works on the highest of literary levels to prove that we do not always need words to think on the deepest of levels about the world around us.

English Language Arts Elements of Story

Plot: When the creators of Love: the Fox asked themselves how significant one incident or experience can have on the surrounding nature and animal life they found a plethora of answers. Just ask their star character, the fox.

Major Characters: foxes, buffalos, rabbits, sheep, various birds, volcano, seals, penguins, polar bears, porcupines, grizzly bears, land and sea

Major Settings: land and sea

Major Themes: Cause and Effect, Survival of the Fittest, Relationships, Love, Family, Destiny and/or Decision, Faith and Reason, Individual and Community

Relevant Reading / Literacy Common Core Standards For Young Adult Readers

Key Ideas and Details

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1*
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.3*

Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme.

* The number(s) referenced above corresponds to the number used by the Common Core Standards (corestandards.org)

Reading Lesson Idea for Young Adult Readers in Language Arts Grades 9 – 10

Directions: Love: the Fox‘s stunning, literary-level artwork provides an excellent platform for educators to use when teaching textual analysis in regards to character development. Instead of analyzing characters through words and word analysis, as is traditional, however, students can analyze characters through images and image analysis, an extremely relevant and historically critical shift in teaching our 21st century shared literacy stage to contemporary readers.

To begin the lesson, educators can ask students to pair up in small groups of two or three and blindly select a theme from a concealed container. Once selecting a theme students can next choose to focus their reading experience on one of two main characters: either nature or animals.

If they choose nature, students need to know that that means their small group is in charge of analyzing how nature, as a character, is developed throughout the course of the story. If they choose animals, students need to know that that means their small group is in charge of analyzing how animals, as characters, are developed throughout the course of the story.

To document their analysis students can write a visual essay that is titled by their theme, followed by a colon and their selection of either nature or animals. For example, it might look something like this . . .

“Individual and Community: Animals”

After titling their visual essay students can next think about each of their paragraphs (from introduction, through each supporting body paragraph, and inevitably the conclusion) and supporting sentences. Which images will best introduce our visual essay analysis and topic? Which images will go in our body paragraphs and best support our introductory statements? Which images will find their way into our conclusion and overall ending thoughts for our visual essay?

When students are finished completing their visual essays each pair should be offered a chance to briefly present and take questions about their end product.