0 Compare and Contrast Two or More Characters in a Story {Freebies Included}!

I'm back for the next part of our character development lesson using Verdi by Janell Cannon. For this lesson, I will be sharing how we used the book to compare and contrast two or more characters in a story, drawing on specific details from the text.

To read the first blog post in this series, and to grab the free Inferring Character Traits Graphic Organizer, click HERE. To check out my other blog post series on character development, click HERE and HERE!

Since our last lesson on inferring character traits through dialogue, my students learned that there are a number of different ways that an author reveals information about a character in a text. An author reveals information about a character through:

• physical traits (both explicit and inferred)
• actions
• thoughts
• dialogue
• interactions with other characters

Once my students had a solid understanding of characterization, we jumped right into comparing and contrasting. While rating and dating our understanding for our Student Data Tracking Binders, I quickly had students show me their level of understanding for comparing and contrasting. With a quick rate it/date it, I learned that my students had very little background knowledge on this concept. Not a big deal! A quick mini-lesson on comparing and contrasting did the trick! 

With this anchor chart, we discussed the terms compare and contrast. I guided students with the idea that authors create relationships between characters, settings, and events in a text by developing the interactions among story elements. Good readers can identify the relationships between story elements by comparing and contrasting them. 

While I love using venn diagrams, an even better tool (in my opinion) to compare and contrast in the upper grades is a double bubble thinking map. 

The reason I like using a double bubble thinking map is because it requires a bit more depth of thought by the students. I love that contrasting requires students to think in terms of point and counterpoint. I promise you they are extremely easy to use!

Some guiding questions that students need to keep in mind in order to compare and contrast and to help them construct their double bubble maps include: 

• What are the similarities and differences between these two things? 
• How are these two things alike and different? 
• Which similarities do you think are most important?
• Are there any details that are unique to one thing and not the other? 

Even though the standard calls for students to also compare and contrast settings and events in a text, for this lesson we only focused on characters. After re-reading Verdi an additional time, we worked together to construct our double bubble thinking map. 

Side note: color coding your double bubble thinking map is a great strategy for students that may need additional help, especially if this is the first time they are seeing it. I've included this as a freebie that you can grab at the end of this post. 

I think this is such a phenomenal visual that perfectly hits the standard on comparing and contrasting two characters. 

Even though we worked together as a class to fill out this double bubble, students also filled out their own.

Once we filled out the double bubble thinking maps, as a formative assessment, students wrote their own written responses to compare and contrast the two characters.

You can grab this free formative assessment and a free double bubble thinking map at the end of this post!

This formative assessment is a great way to quickly gauge your students' understanding of the standard. 

Throughout the rest of the week, students used double bubble thinking maps to compare and contrast the characters in their own self-selected texts. 

At the end of the week, I gave them their summative assessments to assess them on standard 5.RL.3 from my 5th Grade Common Core ELA/Literacy Assessments and Teaching Notes. 

I had to get an extreme closeup of this answer because I have to say, I am pretty impressed with their responses!

On top of that, my teacher heart skipped a beat when I saw this on a student's reading passage! He was annotating the text without any prompting from me! Best day ever!

Check out these reading passages and assessments to use in your classroom HERE!

Grab a free copy of my Verdi formative assessment and color coded double bubble thinking map HERE!

Thanks for reading! 

Detail: Compare and Contrast Two or More Characters in a Story {Freebies Included}!

0 Inferring Character Traits Through Dialogue (Plus a Free Graphic Organizer)!

Have you ever come across a mentor text that literally covers five standards and you squeal with delight? Or am I the only crazy person that gets excited about these types of things?!

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. 

The English Language Arts standard requires students to compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g. how they interact).

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.

As I was reading the pages, students gave me a thumbs up when they heard the author use 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.

After about four minutes, we shared what we could infer about the greens based on their dialogue in the text.

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!

Detail: Inferring Character Traits Through Dialogue (Plus a Free Graphic Organizer)!

0 Character Study Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of our Character Study!

You can read up on Part 1 HERE!

Our Analyzing Character Unit is in FULL swing in our classroom.

We started by discussing the different types of characters in our books. Since we've had many read alouds and read a lot of mentor texts this year, it was easy to refer back to stories we've read together as a class.

Once students were familiar with the types of characters, we went more in-depth with personality traits and physical traits. To demonstrate these concepts, we read the story Boundless Grace, which is a phenomenal mentor text for not only character traits, but for character change as well!

Since I teach 5th graders, we took traits to another level and discussed how authors may come out and explicitly tell you about a character's personality and/or physical traits, but often times do not. Instead, you have to infer these traits from a character's actions, dialogue, thinking, etc.

Studying character traits lasted a few days and I met with groups to re-teach, review, and enrich. I used task cards to give my lower groups quick and easy practice to help with these concepts.

Switching it up now and then can be very beneficial for your lower groups. If students are struggling with reading and comprehension, the idea of inferring character traits may seem overwhelming to them. By providing my students with these short passages to infer character traits, they had the opportunity for extra practice and felt less overwhelmed with the task.

For a quick (and FUN, SUPER CUTE HALLWAY DISPLAY, BONUS!!) formative assessment on physical and personality traits, we completed these Open Mind Profiles which show the inside of our character's brain.

After a few days reading different mentor texts and analyzing/inferring traits, we then moved into character change.

I went back to our original mentor text of Boundless Grace to make those meaningful connections with my students.

This book is also great because so many of my students can connect to the character's problem in the story. Essentially this is what we want our readers to do, isn't it? Not only comprehend and see the character change, but to also take away the "bigger picture" or message and apply it to their own lives? :)

To assess my students' understanding, I gave them a quick reading passage and assessment.

Next, we will start to explore the concept of character conflicts. We will learn about the different type of character conflicts in order to prepare for our next unit on plot.

All of the posters, over 10 graphic organizers, activities, task cards (and much more!!!)  can be found HERE in my Analyzing Characters Pack!

Grab a copy of Boundless Grace to use in your own classroom!

Just added: I wrote a blog post on Inferring Character Traits Through Dialogue (Plus a Free Graphic Organizer). Click HERE to check it out! 

Detail: Character Study Part 2