In this literary lesson, students use fairy tales to practice identifying character traits. Students are challenged to justify their reasoning using text based support.
Students will be able to describe a character’s traits using text-based support.
The adjustment to the whole group lesson is a modification to differentiate for children who are English learners.
EL adjustments
Introduction
(5 minutes)
Call the students together and tell them that today, they will learn about characters in stories.
Remind students that a character can be a person, animal, or creature. When we read about a character, we learn about what makes them different from other characters in the story. We can talk about the character’s physical traits that we can see or we can talk about the character traits they have on the inside.
Tell students that they will need to act like detectives finding evidence to solve a mystery. Remind them that evidence means proof. We will find evidence about character traits by reading about what how different characters act.
Beginning:
Provide a student-friendly definition with a labeled example of a character. Display it on the board.
Show an image of a character from a recent story read in class.
Allow ELs to look up the terms (character, character traits, evidence) with a home language resource. Give them the opportunity to talk with a partner about the terms in their home language.
Intermediate:
Have ELs discuss what they know about character traits with a partner and then share out as a whole group. Allow them to use L1 or L2.
Provide a word bank for students to use when discussing what they know about character traits.
Share examples of character traits of different individuals in the class. For example, identify a student as thoughtful, outgoing, or tall.