Reader's Workshop: Characters

This week, we are knee deep in one of my favorite units of the year. Our mini lessons this month are centered on fiction stories and involve getting to know the characters we read about. Throughout the start of our unit, I have been using books full of small stories about one of my favorite characters: Poppleton! This pig has a lot of spunk to him, and the kids love listening to stories about him just as much as I love reading them.

Last week, we finished up learning about how readers get to know their characters. This anchor chart highlights the important things we learned: 

This week, we've started to dig deeper and are beginning to make inferences about our characters. This is important thinking for your child to engage in as they read. Today's lesson stressed the importance of using clues from the text to figure out what kind of character is in the story. 

We read a chapter together and did some of this great detective work about Poppleton, using clues from the text to support our thinking about what kind of traits would describe Poppleton. 

Finally, I gave the students a copy of the same chapter we read together and asked them to do some detective work about another character. They had to identify a trait to describe Patrick the Finch, and then use clues from the text to support their smart thinking!

You can support this at home as you read together! Encourage your child to tell what kind of person the character is and then ask: "What clues in the text make you think that?" This will help build comprehension and higher-order thinking!