After reading Verdi by Janell Cannon with my students, I just couldn't contain myself!
I have so much to share with you about how we used this book to cover so many standards, that I plan to break it down into two separate blog posts.
Click HERE to check out part two: Comparing and Contrasting Two or more Characters in a Text.
Each year, studying characters is one of my favorite units to teach, and this year is no different. You can see my two other big character blog posts I wrote last year HERE and HERE.
The reason I love teaching characters so much is because of all of the wonderful characters out there that my students can connect with. Whether it's Katniss Everdeen, Percy Jackson, or the unique August Pullman from R.J. Palacio's Wonder, the characters, in my opinion, keep my students coming back for more!
When studying characters, it's important that students understand that we’re talking about what character is, not who some characters are. If I ask my students who the characters are in the books they are reading, most of them can probably name them. For instance, they know that August Pullman is the main character in Wonder.
But, character development is more than that.
Before you jump right into this, it's important that students understand the different ways to determine a character's interactions. To understand their interactions, we need to look at each characters' actions, their dialogue, their thoughts, and their emotions. By looking at these details, they give us insight into how these characters view and/or react to each other, giving us information about their interactions.
To teach this concept, I read Verdi to my students. During this first reading, I allowed my students to sit and listen. But, while listening, they were to pay attention to each characters' personality and physical traits that the author came out and explicitly stated in the book. For the purpose of this lesson, we compared Verdi with the group of snakes called the greens. The greens' names are Umbles, Aggie, Dozer, and Ribbon. Once we finished this first reading, I gave students about two minutes to whisper the explicit traits of the greens and Verdi that they recalled from the text.
Next, we discussed the fact that authors don't always come out and give every detail about a character. Sometimes, the reader has to infer based on the dialogue in the story.
Now that we had read the story once, each student received their own Inferring Character Traits Graphic Organizer to fill out during our re-read and mini-lesson.
I went back and re-read some important pages from Verdi and picked out pages where the author used dialogue to show the characters' personality traits.
Then, focusing on just one character (or group of characters e.g., the greens), we worked together to pick out some of the best quotes from the text that we could use to infer personality traits based on the characters' dialogue.
Students worked with me to fill out their own graphic organizers for the dialogue portion, but it was up to them to do the inferring.
I gave students about four minutes to write down their own inferences, and I walked the room to glance over their shoulders and help students that needed some re-teaching.
This graphic organizer is a free sample from my Analyzing Characters Pack {Common Core Aligned} found HERE!
Click HERE to grab the free Inferring Character Traits Graphic Organizer!
Grab a copy of Verdi to use in your own classroom!
Click HERE to check out part two of this series: Comparing and Contrasting Two or More Characters in a Text. Make sure you grab all of the freebies in the post!
Thanks for reading!