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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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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Making Inferences: Scaffolding the Strategy Whole-Class and Small Group *Freebie!

Making inferences is tough! It's is one of the more difficult things we ask kids to do. We model, model, model, but making an inference requires more than following some steps. It requires some sense of what is logical and how we use evidence and background knowledge. It's tricky! Especially for our struggling readers, making inferences requires multiple exposures with lots of scaffolding.  To help kids make inferences that are logical, I try to keep them very closely tied to the text.   This doesn't mean that I don't value their background knowledge - background knowledge is so important to reading deeply! It just means that sometimes, students don't use background knowledge to understand text evidence; they use background knowledge to replace text evidence. And that's not good reading.   So I teach kids to use background knowledge to understand the evidence the text has provided. This means we have to start with the evidence!   

 Whole-Class Scaffolding

 This is a lesson we did with our second grade students. We were focusing on making inferences about a character. Specifically, we were working with A Bad Case of Stripes.

There is a lot of evidence about Camilla Cream's character in A Bad Case of Stripes. We wanted our kids to learn how to focus on searching for evidence to support their inferences. 

First, we started with introducing the strategy and what our purpose for reading was. The questions were charted on the left side of the chart before the teacher began reading the book. The teacher read the first question before starting the book to help focus the kids' thinking.

As the teacher read the book aloud, the kids listened for evidence that would help them specifically respond to the question. As they found evidence to respond to the question, it was charted on the right side. They used the specific details to make an inference and respond to the question. The answer was charted under the question on the left. 

Once the first question was answered, the teacher charted the second question to set a purpose for reading the next piece of text. The process continued throughout the book to help kids think about Camilla's character at different points in the story.

Small Group Scaffolding

 Sometimes what we do for the whole group doesn't "click" with some kids. They try to understand, but the learning is elusive. Small groups are a great time to differentiate your instruction and provide some scaffolding for students to learn a concept in a more structured way.

This is a tool I've used with small groups to help scaffold their inference-making skills. I chose a text very carefully that had several opportunities for students to make inferences. This can be challenging when you're working with a group of struggling readers. It's tough to find a text they can navigate at an instructional level and still have opportunities to "read between the lines" because the text is often so straightforward. Maybe this is easier for others than it is for me, but to ensure that my lesson is as accurate as possible, I really have to do some thinking! 

I chose a leveled reader from our supplemental materials after several re-reads. I found a few places in the text where I could make an inference. I made a two-columned table and and recorded the text evidence in order on the left side, in the order it appeared in the text. On a separate page, I made a blank some blank boxes and typed in the inferences I was able to make using the evidence. These I typed up out of order.

As students read the text, we hunted for the text evidence. Once they found it in the text, we read around it and thought about what we could "tell" from the evidence. Then we looked at the answer choices - the four inference statements that I typed up on the cards - and decided which one accurately matched the evidence. I had students circle a few words that helped them understand the inference was supported by the evidence. 

These are the questions I asked to guide their thinking:

What does the evidence mean?

From the evidence, which inference can we say is true? 

Which inference is supported by the piece of evidence?

Do the inference and evidence have similar meanings?

These questions helped focus the kids' thinking and made sure they were being logical in their evidence-inference connection.

Supporting inferences with evidence

I did a similar activity to work on the reverse of the evidence-inference process. I provided the inferences on the table, and the kids had to match the text evidence to explain which sentence from the text best supported the evidence. We read the article first and discussed important ideas. Then we read the evidence on the cards and sequenced them to locate the context of the evidence in the text. 

Then we read our inferences on the right side of the column and tried to logically connect the evidence to the inferences on the chart, making decisions about which piece of evidence helped us prove the inference true.

It was more challenging than moving from evidence to inferences, and required more time the first time I taught the lesson. But these scaffolding strategies helped our kids become more deliberate in their inference-making and inference-justifying. I used them with kids in grades three and four; special education students and general education students, too! 

What do you do to support kids' inference-making?

 Here's a handy dandy FREEBIE to help you scaffold your inference instruction!

And get all my Reading Strategy MiniPacks in the BIG BUNDLE!

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