Character Studies in Reader's Workshop

We have been loving our character unit in Reader's Workshop. The students have been getting right into the minds of their characters to learn and understand more about their feelings, predict their actions, and make inferences. Each student began the unit with a bag of different books all about the same character. After reading and marking scenes, the students partnered up with another classmate who was reading about the same character. The two partners directed and acted out scenes from the book to help visualize the character better. They worked together to think about how act and speak just as the character would!

We then explored some deeper thinking and moved into a book club to get some "juicy" discussion going. Groups of four of five students all reading/studying the same character got together to talk about their character. In our mini lessons, we discussed how we can find patterns across our books. The students were so smart noticing how similar a character can act across different books! This helped us infer what a character might do based on what we had read about him/her in previous books. We also discussed places where we notice the character having strong feelings, and when those strong feelings change. This helped us get to know our character even better and helped us generate a list of character traits that would fit our characters!

To finish up our unit, each book club is creating a character board. First, we used the illustrations in our books to carefully work together and create a life size drawing of our character. These are completely student made- and they are a riot! I am totally impressed with what an amazing job each group is doing! The students are also surrounding their characters with traits to describe what each character is like. This requires group members to really discuss and agree why a character might be responsible, lazy, brave, etc. We have spent a lot of time discussing how we must find evidence in the text to support our inferences. I love hearing group members say "What makes you think that?" or "Can you give an example?" to really encourage good discussion around traits that truly describe each character!

Here's a sneak peek at groups working on their life-size drawings for their character boards. Tomorrow I will post the finished products! I can't wait for you to see them! :)