Analyzing characters is an important aspect of reading literacy. There are a million ideas out there for how you can encourage students to think deeper about characters, focus on particular details, and recognize character growth throughout a book.
Right now, my kiddos are finishing up a long novel that we have been reading. It's more advanced, and requires a lot of critical thinking. I wanted to do an activity with my students that allowed them to look at main characters with a different lens on. Typically, main characters change mentally, emotionally, socially, etc, throughout a book. Sometimes I feel as though I get caught up in wanting my students to understand what's going on in the book and overlook important details such as character changes.
Here is a graphic organizer that I created a while back. Recently, I decided to tweak it a bit and make it as useful as I could. The worksheet is to be completed for one character. Students will have to identify different characteristics of their character, including what he/she thinks, sees, feels, says, does, etc. It's a great way to get students to look beyond the surface of a character and truly analyze who they are.
(This is just a preview of part of the worksheet)
In my small group, I assigned each student a main character (there are a lot) in Part I of our book (there are three parts in all). I made copies of this worksheet back-to-back. When we began the book I told my students to fill out the front side as best as they could. Now that we are finishing the book, I asked my students to complete the back side of the worksheet about the character at the END of the book. We spent a lot of time reflecting on how each character had changed throughout the book and how they have become a different person. After a deep discussion, I had each student write at least one page about their character's transformation.
There are MANY ways to use this graphic organizer. The bottom line is, we all want our students to critically think about important characters in their books. Using programs such as balanced literacy, we look to develop a student's comprehension skills and critical thinking abilities. I have found this graphic organizer to help me cultivate those skills within my kiddos.
If you're interested in purchasing this graphic organizer, check out my TpT store!
Otherwise, I hope it gave you some inspiration or ideas on how to help your students get to know their characters.
Emily :)
No comments:
Post a Comment