Studying Characters' Emotions

One great book to use to help students understand characters' emotions is The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. It's a beautifully illustrated book. On each set of facing pages, there is an emotion represented in the tones and colors of the illustration. The text rhymes and does a vivid job of describing that specific emotion, showing kids when they might feel that way.

 

To make inferences using The Way I Feel during a read aloud, simply cover up the emotion with a post-it. Have students gather clues by recording the details the character says, does, and what other characters are doing. The illustrations make a great place to gather information too!

Then they can infer the emotion depicted on each page. If kids are stuck, provide them an Emotions List like this freebie I've made for you on Google Drive

 

Grab the freebie here!

Then we worked with making inferences on some character emotions task cards. I handed out the cards to students and they highlighted evidence on the card that helped them infer how the character was feeling in that instance.

After they marked their evidence, they sorted the cards into different headers of the emotions. Students used their lists for this, too, to help them think of different ways to describe how the character felt in the card. Rather than always saying, "The character was angry," they learned words like "furious," or "upset."
 

We also have students gather clues during shared reading. During our reading of Wolf, students recorded evidence and made inferences about the wolf's emotions.

 

Grab these ideas in my Character Emotions Unit    and my 41 Characters Analysis Tools.  

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Structures and elements of dramas and plays *Freebie!

Do you spend much time on drama? Like, after PE or lunch?

Hahahaha I am cracking myself up.

Well, obviously, that's not the kind I'm talking about. For the past two weeks, I've been working in some fourth grade classrooms.

Our current unit in reading is drama: plays. We've been working on the structures unique to dramatic literature (cast of characters, stage directions, scenes, etc.), and making inferences to describe the characters in dramas. 

And it's been so much fun!

We started out by introducing the various structures of drama and just finding examples in a dramatic text.

We used Storyworks by Scholastic. There aren't a ton of stage directions at the beginning of each scene, but they're engaging plays for kids. 

These are the structures we introduced. For each one, we had students practice a gesture to help them remember the meaning. For example, the gesture for "dialogue" is to place your open hand on your mouth and move it away from your mouth to show the lines the characters say. These gestures helped students recall the meaning of the structures.

The second day, we started out by identifying the genre (again). It's so important for kids to practice identifying the genre of a text and think about how that will impact their reading - the strongest readers change the way they read a text based on the genre. That's why teaching reading by genre is so important!

We used our genre cards on rings to identify the genre and then I gave each student about ten tiny post-its. They had five minutes to hunt through the genre and identify the structures we introduced the day before.

After the kids hunted through their dramas and labeled the structures they could find, I handed out this table. You can download it for free from Google Docs. It includes the main structures of drama and the definition. As we read, we tried to explain how that dramatic structure helped us as a reader and filled in the third column.

The next few days, we worked on describing characters in drama using their words (dialogue), actions (stage directions) and what other characters said about them (others' dialogue). To do this, we used one of the sheets from my Scaffolded Reading Responses for Drama and Plays.

Students collected details about the main character in the play, named Felipe. They noticed his dialogue (he often told lies), the stage directions (he whined, stomped his feet, and crossed his fingers behind his back when he made a promise), and what other characters said about him (his servants didn't have a very good opinion of him).

Then students used the sentence starters in the middle of the page to write a response using their evidence. Students were able to write about the character using specific details from the text and make accurate inferences. It was a good start in helping students understand dramas and plays!

For more ideas about teaching dramas and plays, check out my Teaching Drama pinterest board here.

 

Grab my Scaffolded Reading Responses for Drama and Plays on TPT!

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Making Inferences about Character Traits

Not too long ago, I sat through a workshop that was meant to teach teachers something brand-new. I was in the room with teachers who had never used the instructional strategy before. As the day progressed, we read about the strategy, discussed the strategy, and brainstormed ideas for the strategy. But by the end of the day, several teachers left saying, "I still don't know how to actually do it. What am I supposed to do? What does it look like?"

How often do our kids feel that way during a lesson? Sometimes we're a little too broad, and our most struggling kids get lost. To really support our struggling students, I worked with a group of special education students who were getting ready for their big test. We focused on a few important reading skills. In fiction, we really spent a lot of time on making inferences.

We wanted to really focus on a few things to make inferences as concrete as possible (which isn't very).

We focused on looking for three kinds of evidence: what the character says, what the character does, and what other character say about them. I started out building the anchor chart above with the kids. We hunted through a sample paragraph, searching for the three types of clues. We marked it with yellow and then annotated on the margin to state what that piece of evidence told us about the character. The phrase "We can tell" is helpful to get kids thinking about what they logically know.

Then, we did a little team practice. Each team of three received a set of character trait cards. On each card was a little paragraph describing a character. The kids hunted through the cards, marking evidence about the characters' traits with a highlighter. Then they used a list of character traits to decide on an appropriate trait for that character.

The next step is to take it to real reading. As students read their independent reading books, have them choose a character and locate some text evidence. Then they can record it on the graphic organizer below, using the evidence to make inferences about that character.

You can grab this freebie here, at Google Drive!

And you can get the Character Trait Cards in 41 Character Analysis Charts, Activities & Tools on TPT.

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