Character Book Clubs

We loved our character unit in Reader's Workshop! It was great to see the kids so involved! Each group began the unit with a basket of different books all about the same character. After reading and marking scenes independently, the students partnered up with another group member who was reading about the same character. They worked together to think about how act and speak just as the character would!

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 used evidence from the text to support these inferences. 

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. We did some character mapping in our reader response journals too.

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! The students are 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. I love hearing group members say "What makes you think that?" or "Can you give an example from the book?" 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. I will post the finished products soon! I can't wait for you to see them. :)