I’m linking up with the always inspiring Miss DeCarbo at Second Grade Sugar and Spice for a little Wordless Wednesday fun today! If you’ve been reading my blog for a little while now you may have figured out that I’m a huge fan of Lucy Calkins and Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Workshop! I’m lucky enough this year to be a part of a Teacher Leader group with a staff developer from TC. Yesterday, we had another training and I just fell in love with this simple graphic organizer to use with students to help delve deeper into character analysis!
As students progress with their comprehension, they’re not just reciting character emotions and feelings when describing characters in the text. We want to move them away from describing characters as happy, sad, mad, or funny. In order to assist students in doing this difficult work, we need to teach them how to look at the character’s actions, thoughts, and words in the text to help support how they feel. This graphic organizer, that can be a simple drawing on a post-it for a reader to fill out, will help them find these three elements in a text. Once they jot down what a character thinks, what they say, and what they are doing, they will be better equipped to prove how a character feels. SO simple yet SO effective! Students can whip this up on their own or you can provide them with a blank template that’s laminated so students can easily reuse them!
I feel like I always hit the jackpot for reading and writing ideas when I meet with these amazing team of teachers.
So my question for you today is, what is your go-to tool or graphic organizer to help your students analyze characters?
I hope you’re having a great week! Don’t forget to link back to Miss DeCarbo’s site to see more teacher’s posts!
Enjoy!
2 Comments
There are a few TPT ones that I like, as well as a few from Florida Center!
Noelle
This is great. Teaching doesn't have to be fancy! I actually just posted on character development last week. My lesson was similar, but we organized the information in a table. Find it here: Not very fancy in 1st I'm your newest follower!
Deb @Not very fancy in 1st