October Reading Workshop

Developing Ideas About Characters

In this unit, students will begin to look closely at characters based on their thoughts, actions and dialogue. They will make inferences about the characters and come up with ideas about the types of people these characters are.  

Students will begin to notice that characters are complex, and very often can be described in more than one way.  

Students will begin to notice that the internal struggle often affects the character's external struggle.  The students will learn that often, characters grow (or change) from the beginning of the story to the end.  As a class, we will be paying close attention to the clues the author gives us about the type of person a character is at the beginning of a story, compared to the type of person they are at the end.  

In order to do this work, we will be reading a number of short stories together as a class.  Below are a list of some of the stories we will be using to examine characters:

Questions we will ask ourselves as we begin to examine characters:

• Think about the problem your character is having.       Ask: What kind of person would have a problem like this?
• Pay close attention to things your character says, does and thinks.  Ask:  What kind of person would say, do or think these things?
• Pay attention to how your character interacts with others 
• Pay attention to when your character has a strong emotion.  Ask:  What kind of person would act like this?