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 Traits

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about one of my fifth grade lessons on character feelings. Along with this lesson, I also taught a lesson on character traits. As with the character feelings lesson, the students and I focused on using strong adjectives to describe our characters. Words like nice and mean were not allowed!

To introduce the concept, I read aloud the book Rough, Tough Charley by Verla Kay.

This was an amazing book for character analysis. Charley is a complex character, which gave students the opportunity to explore many different character traits. The best part of this book is that Charley is actually a woman. Throughout the entire book, the author has you believing that Charley is a boy. The students absolutely loved this twist in the story.

As we read, we completed the following anchor chart.

For the modeling portion of the lesson, I completed the first character trait. I said that Charley was hardworking. As evidence for this trait, I explained that Charley worked in a stable as a child. I wrote both the character trait and supporting evidence on a notecard and added it to the anchor chart.  The students and I worked together to come up with the remaining character traits and evidence, which were also added to the anchor chart on notecards. The other traits included brave, tough, talented, and vulgar. 

For more guided practice, students independently read the short story "A Pet" from the book Every Living Thing by Cynthia Rylant. This book includes many different stories about children and animals. The students can really relate to these stories. The story "A Pet" is about a young girl that wants a pet very badly. Her parents finally buy her a fish, although that was not exactly the pet she had in mind. The girl takes care of the fish, but in the end the fish dies. Many of the students shared similar stories about pets from their own lives.

After reading and discussing the short story, we completed a character map for the main character Emma. We came up with four traits to describe Emma and evidence from the text to support the selected trait.

For independent practice, students read the short story Tough as Daisy from a past Highlights issue. In fact, the story was used in a past NAEP assessment. This story is about a young girl named Daisy who is the only girl at a wrestling match. A copy of the story can be found at https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fed.sc.gov%2Fagency%2Fprograms-services%2F44%2Fdocuments%2F2011-ReadingItemsFinal.pdf. (scroll to page 9) The questions from the assessment are also provided, if you are interested. 

With this story, the students completed the character map independently. The original character map is from Pomeraug Regional School District 15. You can get a copy by clicking on the image below and scrolling to page 3. 

Enjoy! :)