Sunday, September 30, 2018

Reader's Workshop: Character Traits

Our Reader's Workshop is well underway in 1-Thomson!  This past week, we spent lots of time reading books by one of favorite authors, Kevin Henkes.  We especially enjoyed reading Chrysanthemum.  This story is about a sweet little mouse who loves her name until her first day of school, when some of her classmates make fun of it!  By story's end, Chrysanthemum learns to love her name again after she realizes it's what makes her special and unique!  Using this story, along with other Kevin Henkes stories, we discussed character traits and how a character's feelings, thoughts, and actions can change throughout a story.  We thought of just the right words to describe Chrysanthemum as she changes throughout the book- happy, proud, angry, upset, frustrated, confident...
We added these words to our character map:

Then, we made our very own Chrysanthemum puppets! One side shows a happy Chrysanthemum, and the other side shows a sad Chrysanthemum.  As we retold the events of the story, students would hold up the appropriate Chrysanthemum face based on her feelings at that point in the story.

Practice retelling stories at home and using character trait words to describe the people or animals in the story.  Do the character's thoughts, feelings, or actions change?  Happy Reading!

-Mrs. Thomson :)

Common Core State Standards:
RL.1.2: Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson.
RL.1.3: Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

No comments:

Post a Comment