Character Analysis

Today I am going to be sharing about character analysis, one of my favorite things to teach!

Characters play such an important role in the stories we read. They make the stories what they are! For this reason, I love teaching my students how to analyze characters. The truly great stories have such wonderfully complex and fascinating characters.

To begin, I reviewed the concept of characters with my third graders. We discussed how characters can be people, animals, or creatures. When we read our stories, we discussed how we play extra close attention to our characters' thoughts, feelings, actions, and especially how they change throughout the story. Together we brainstormed a list of popular character traits, which we added to our anchor chart.

We read three stories with very strong characters. When working on character analysis, make sure the characters in the stories you choose are complex enough to be analyzed. With the first book, I modeled how to fill out our character analysis graphic organizer. On the organizer, I identified the character's problem, how the character solved their problem, character traits, and how the character changed over time.

For the second story, we completed the graphic organizer together. (Reading A-Z has a great book called Arthur's Bad News Day that works great for character analysis!) Then, for the final story, I chose a short story from an old Highlights magazine. Students completed the graphic organizer independently for the last story.

If you would like a copy of the graphic organizer, click here, or on the image above!

What are some of your favorite books for teaching about characters?

Character Change

My fifth graders and I have been working on character change for a couple of weeks. When I was planning this lesson, I thought to myself, what better way to show change over time than with a timeline? As a result, my students and I used timelines to show how our characters changed throughout stories. We then used our timeline to complete short answer questions about these character changes.

To begin, I read aloud the story The Recess Queen. This story has a very clear, straightforward example of character change. The main character, Mean Jean, starts out as a bully. A new girl moves to school and asks Mean Jean to play at recess. Mean Jean has never been asked to play before, and this is the turning point in the story where she stops being a bully.

After reading aloud the story, I modeled how to use a timeline to show how the character in the story (Mean Jean) had changed over time.

Once we had constructed the timeline, we answered two short answer questions:

1. How did the character change from the beginning of the story to the end?

2. Why did the character change?

With these questions, we were focusing on the overall change of the character, from the beginning to the end,  summed up in 1-2 sentences. We also focused on why the character changed, which is always a very important part of the story and key to understanding the character.

After the read-aloud, we moved to guided practice. Students read a short story called Papa's Parrot. This is from Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. (Which you must read if you haven't already!) In this short story, Henry learns to appreciate his father more once he becomes sick. This is a beautiful story that explores some deep emotions. 

The students and I completed the timeline and written response questions together with this story. Then, we moved onto a short story from Highlights magazine called  The Talebearer's Lesson. I absolutely love this folktale. The main character goes around town spreading lies about the local rabbi, but eventually feels guilty. He goes to the rabbi seeking forgiveness, and the rabbi instructs him to open up a pillow and feed the feathers to the wind. After he has completed this task, he returns to the rabbi for further instructions. The rabbi tells him to go collect the feathers. When the man explains that he cannot possibly collect all of the feathers, the rabbi explains that this is a metaphor for telling stories about people. You can never take back what you have said. It has already spread all over. This was a tricky message for my students, but once they figured it out, they loved it! They felt so smart!

With this story, students completed the timeline and questions independently. We are continuing to work on the structure of our written responses, but overall the students did a very nice job. If you would like a copy of the graphic organizer click here or on the image above.

Do you have any special ways of teaching character change or book recommendations?