Character Descriptions
Teaching character descriptions is one of my FAVORITE standards. It is so fun and filled with many possibilities, so why not assess it in an engaging way for students? These ideas began in 4th grade when students just weren’t engaged with the characters in their books. They are tried and true activities used in my classroom in multiple grade levels.
If you’ve been around my blog, you know formative assessment is all about being a responsive teacher. This means listening to student needs and instructing appropriately. The only way to do this is by keeping good track of their progress. Do you have an organized system for this yet? If not, fear not! Download this free guide to get you started on the right track with assessment organization, the first step in becoming a responsive teacher.
Step by Step Process
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Character Traits List
Let’s first start by understanding a character traits definition to clear up confusion between a character feeling vs trait. This was confusing to me when I first started teaching.
A character feeling can come and go while a trait is a regular behavior that is part of a character’s personality. This comparison chart can be helpful in practicing these skills especially because some words can act as a feeling or trait depending on the character. Offering a question for students to ask themselves when doing this work and sharing examples can help them to come to conclusions about the character.
These anchor charts from the Reading Strategies book helped me teach character descriptions well in the beginning of the character unit. Using a character web can be a fun and creative way for students to learn to use text evidence and elaborate about characters.
I like to list words in columns with their synonyms and practice different meanings of similar words. This is a great time to practice synonyms and gradation of meaning with synonym timelines. Simply give a list of character traits synonyms and have students place them on a timeline based on intensity. This changes student thinking and makes characters and their traits become a natural part of thinking while reading. See this activity below for a great critical thinking activity that is easy to recreate.
Character Descriptions and Traits Lesson Plan Ideas to Engage & Assess
DRAMA: Character Analysis Worksheet Ideas
This character analysis project allows students to take on the role of a character. Drama is incorporated as students work through each activity as their character. Students understand their character more and more as a person while working through different character descriptions on each page.
- Choose and BECOME your character. Students will get excited (even 4th and 5th graders)! They can practice introducing themselves to a partner as their character before they begin.
- External- Describe outward appearance.
- Internal Pt 1 (feelings)- Describe how “YOU’RE” feeling.. list character feelings here
- Internal Pt 2 (traits)- Describe personality.. what makes you who you are? Gather text evidence from character dialogue, actions and behavior. This character traits worksheet can be used as an assessment.
- Understand yourself (vocabulary)- Dig deeper into those traits by learning some synonyms so you can really understand who you are
- Outside influences- Think about relationships that you have with other characters..how do they influence your behavior?
- *At this point, students can stop thinking like their character and begin to analyze their character as themselves. Theory– Students create a theory about their character describing who they really are as a person and all the evidence to support that idea.
- Give advice (plot)- Students write an advice letter to their character that may help to support them with future conflict..aka work through the plot.
ASSESSING: Each step can be used as a formative assessment on a rubric! Create a 4, 3, 2, 1 rubric for each step with expectations that are universal. Multiple categories may include understanding content, understanding character, elaboration and editing. Having multiple categories gives SO much data to use for future instruction. Utilize this date with a few days of small groups to intervene and enrich. This pivotal type of instruction makes a huge difference for student understanding.
DRAMA: Game Show
During talk shows in my classroom, students really have to get into character… They examine voice, expression, everything… We are full-on acting in our classroom. When I do this whole group, the activity is always about a novel that I am reading aloud to the class. We come up with a name for our talk show, I get into character as the talk show host, and ALL of the students are the main character. We play some music and when the music stops, the talk show starts.
As a teacher, you’ll need to reflect about how to best get into character and stay there so this doesn’t become one big, silly activity. But when students are given guidelines about getting into character, they really take this seriously and they learn so much!
ASSESSING: Use a character analysis rubric again to get some data about student understanding. Some students may not be quite as comfortable with this process so it is important to use other ways to assess this as well. You can add oral speaking to this rubric as well.
Read more about how to use this activity here.
DRAMA: Interviews (small group)
This is a newer one that I have tried that is SO much fun for students. Students bring their own independent reading book to the small group table. They each make a name card for their main character. They take on the role of the main character throughout the interview while students in the group ask questions to get to know them better. This shows a deep level of comprehension because students have to give reasoning for the feelings and traits so other students understand their character descriptions. Try out these free questions to get started with character interviews. Have fun with this one and make it your own!
ASSESSING: Using a checklist with your own indicators or a pre-made checklist like the one listed above, you can listen to student responses and check off if they know the information. Possible ideas for assessing may include character feelings, traits, relationships with other characters and actions.
DRAMA: Partner scenes
Students add another scene to their book, change the ending, etc. I often use a choice board so students have ideas and can decide how they want to interact with the book.They practice with a partner and perform for their book club for a larger group.
ASSESS: If you are looking to assess a particular indicator, include specific details when you present the task to students. Use a checklist to assess and add in a section for collaboration and oral speaking skills so you can assess smarter for this activity.
ART: Character Concept or Relationship Map
There is so much creativity that is involved with this activity. You can see personalities come to light here as you give students a chance to express themselves. Put the character name in the middle of the map and let students draw different lines and bubbles off to describe all the aspects of the character. This activity is excellent for assessing different character descriptions and components all in one shot. Each bubble can be a different standard or a part you want to assess such as feelings, motivations, internal conflicts, etc. Allow students to draw pictures and use words to express their thinking.
ASSESSING: Rubrics are an excellent way to assess here. Create it ahead of time with all of the components you want to include and show it to students so that they can strive for mastery.
ART: Doodles
Students use encapsulation to sketch the most pivotal moment in their story. This may be from the plot as they draw an important scene or an interactions between characters with captions to show the dialogue taking place.
ASSESSING: A checklist works well here so it is quick and easy. Focus on one skill (plot, character interaction, theme) and create a few target points on the checklist. Did they encapsulate an important moment? Did they use detail? This is a quick formative assessment to see if they understand or not.
ART: Portrait
Students draw a portrait of a character and write a paragraph biography to describe their character descriptions. Show many examples such as the Mona Lisa, Girl with the Pearl Earring, and American Gothic. They must try to encapsulate their character with this drawing. Set it up as an Art Gallery in your classroom and invite parents, teachers or other classes to come visit! You can even add a game component with your own class to have them post sticky notes around the portrait to describe how they view this character before they attaching the biographies written by the artist.
ASSESSING: This may be used more like a performance assessment so a rubric to analyze the picture and paragraph character descriptions content may be more impactful here.
ART: The many faces of “(insert character name)”
Create a version of the famous Andy Warhol pop art to describe the many faces of a main character. Draw a grid with 4 squares for students to draw a portrait in each square. Altering from the original Andy Warhol art, kids can show a new emotion in each square and use color accordingly to describe the mood. This is a great time to give a little background about this famous artist, mediums in art or an SEL lesson about how we all have many different feelings/emotions.
ASSESSING: This may work better as a rubric since you are tracking a character throughout a novel and will be looking for different text evidence to go with each emotion.
Character Traits Books
There are many great books out there to support character trait work with both primary and upper grades. Some of my favorite novels for character trait work in upper grades include The One and Only Ivan, Number the Stars, Out of my Mind, Andrew Clements and Roald Dahl books.
Allowing students to express themselves and demonstrate understanding through art has been so impactful in my classroom. It gives students who may have difficulty writing or getting their ideas out a chance to show what they know in beautiful ways. Try something out and let me know how it goes!
