Teaching Character Traits

Last week, we talked a lot about character traits. My kids were having a lot of trouble giving specific traits to characters. We needed to expand our vocabulary and digger deeper to really analyze our characters. I did an activity in whole group that really helped, so I wanted to share with y'all.

We started off by reading a super simple text that provided great characters that we could easily analyze and give traits to.

We analyze the character of Princess Elizabeth and determined she was strong minded. We thought Prince Ronald was vain and shallow and found the dragon to be vicious. Then we backed up our traits with evidence from the text and recorded this on the recording sheet-I forgot to take a pic of this in action, but I did remember to take one later of a different character, but you get the idea!

Then we broke into groups and used passages from my Character Comprehension pack

Then it was time for individual practice! I complied a stack of picture books. Most of them were below level, but that was fine. The point of the activity was to identify character trait and practicing with an easier task allowed them to focus on analyze the character. Want to know the best part? My kids who were always the first to say they didn't like reading were the ones with the biggest smiles on their faces. They kept talking about remembering reading those books in kindergarten and 1st grade. They couldn't wait pick out a book and read it. 

You can find these activities in my Character Comprehension pack. Click here to check it out!

I've also uploaded my Tuck Everlasting unit. You can find it here.

Here's a little preview of what you'll see in it.