Studying a Character's Traits and Motivations

Discussing a character's traits is not new to my third graders, but we started by reviewing a list of character traits. 

Then we discussed some traits that we might use to describe ourselves.  After splitting my class into small groups, I handed them a bag of character trait cards.  They had to work together to decide which character trait might be used to describe each of them.

 They had to give evidence to their group about why that character trait could be used to describe them.  Each student used this sentence stem:  A trait that describes me is ___________ because __________. 
Then, each student glued their character trait in their reader's notebooks and wrote the sentence stem.

Here's the character trait cards we used:

Character Trait Cards

 

 

 

The next day I read this book to the class:

 

 

This is a super cute story!  It was a hit with the class! It's a good example to show how characters can change throughout a story.

 

 

Another day I read aloud:

 

 

This is another great read-aloud to show how a character's traits can change throughout the story.  We discussed what the problems and the resolutions were in the story to cause the character to change.

 

As we read these stories, we filled out a chart to document the traits and evidence from the text. We added this chart to our reader's notebooks.

 

Character Traits Chart

 

 

 

That's all I have for now!!