Analyzing Characters - Part 3

I love, love, love teaching literary elements. We've continued to work on analyzing characters the last few weeks and below are a few lessons I've done with my 2nd graders.


Another great character book is No David.  We read the story together in class and they created a bubble map describing David.

Next up on the reading list, we read Strega Nona. This is a great book for characters and for comparing and contrasting the two main characters, Strega Nona and Big Anthony.  We read the story, completed a bubble map for each character, and then the students had to write down one of the traits and provide text evidence for the trait.

 

Class Completed Bubble Maps

 

Student Bubble Map on Big Anthony

 

I love this one - Big Anthony was sad because he had to eat all the pasta.

 

And, the most recent story we used was Chester's Way.  After reading, we created a circle map for all of the characters.  We used stars or little clouds to show which characters were the main characters.  Then, students picked the main character that they were most like and told why.

I am like Chester because I like to rake the leaves.

Chester's Way Character Circle Map - Lilly, Wilson, and Chester starred because they are the main characters.

Love this one - I am like Lilly because I do things my way.

 

 

Sorry I've been MIA for awhile. We had report cards and conferences this week and getting ready for that took some time since I'm new to the school and district!  Almost done though - only 3 conferences left! I promise to be a better blogger :-).

Using Time for Kids to Learn About Bats

We are very lucky and have a Time for Kids subscription for each class at our school.  Time for Kids is a great way to incorporate informational text, learn about text features, and write informational responses.  On Friday, we read the recent Time for Kids issue about bats. 

As we were reading, we talked about text features.  We spent time looking at the headings, fact box, glossary, photographs, and captions, and the kids are starting to pick up the text features on their own.  When we were done we started a circle map about bats and added the facts learned from Time for Kids. After adding those facts, we read an informational book about Bats. Then, we added more facts. The kiddos loved learning all of the cool things about bats and the pictures in both the article and book were awesome.

 

 

More Analyzing Characters

I posted the other day about my first analyzing character lesson using Lilly from Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse that I saw on ReadWorks.org.  Now, this next lesson I did started with an idea from ReadWorks.org, but then took off on it's own. To continue with the Lilly theme and see how a recurring character would be in two different stories, towards the end of last week we read Julius, The Baby of the World. Another great Kevin Henkes book - his books are fantastic for literary elements.

 

While reading we stopped a few times, once after the first page to write down Lilly's traits, once towards the end of the middle section, and then again at the end. To show Lilly's character traits we used a bubble map.  As we were going we saw that Lilly's characteristics changed throughout the book.  In the very beginning, she was excited to have a baby brother.  Then, in the middle she was jealous (love that my ELL kiddos came up with that word that describes Lilly perfectly).  And, in the end, she sticks up for her brother and becomes protective.  As we were charting this together as a class and independently, I was talking with the kids about how confusing the chart looked since it said she was nice, mean, excited, grumpy, and rude.  I had an aha moment! I decided to have the kiddos and myself mark each bubble with a B for beginning, M for middle, and E for end, so we knew which part of the story we saw those traits in.  I'm sure someone has thought of this before, but it was one of those teaching moments where I was like how have I not thought of it. 

 

So, on day 1 we completed the bubble map....see examples

 

 

Then, on day 2, we took the bubble map and wrote up a little analysis as a class since it was our first time writing it. 

 

 

 

For our first try at character analysis I think we did a pretty good job.  Look for these lessons and lesson ideas to continue with Strega Nona next week.

 

Place Value Strategy for Problem Solving

We've been working through the story problems in my October Story Problem Packet, which can be found on TPT here.  There are a variety of add to, take from, part/part whole, and multiplication and division problems. We've been focusing on the straightforward addition and subtraction problems so far, but this week we're going to try some of the others.

Here are some of our problems...

Prompt: ___ spiders were hanging from the web.  _____ more spiders crawled over.  How many spiders are in the web now?  Number Choices: (23, 20), (43, 41), (67, 52)

 

 

 

 

 

What I love about these is students can choose a number choice that works for them. One that challenges them, but doesn't challenge them so much they get frustrated.  I also love seeing all of the kids using the place value model to solve their problem. We've been doing a lot of review of place value with tens and ones and I'm happy to see them applying it to story problems too.

 

If you're interested in some October Story Problems to use in your class, check out my packet on TPT here.

 

 

ReadWorks.org

I'm sure many of you are already using www.readworks.org, but if you're not you have to check it out.  It is a great website that has many common core reading standards, lessons that go with it, independent practice options, etc.  It is wonderful!

My kids have really been struggling with analyzing characters and I found a great lesson on ReadWorks last week.  Using the story, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse you analyze Lilly looking at her actions, what she was thinking, and how she was feeling.  We stopped multiple times as we were reading through the story to fill out our "recipe" of Lilly's personality.  To document her actions, thoughts, and feelings, we used a tree map.  See below...

 

 

We also studied Lilly further using the story Julius, The Baby of the World.  Stay tuned for that post tomorrow!

 

More Schema...Independent Practice Time

Wow...have the last few weeks gotten away from me. I've taken pictures while at school, but the whole blogging thing when I got home hasn't been happening. So, now it's time to play catch up!

After practicing schema and text to self connections a few times whole group and through guided instruction, it was now time for independent practice.  I picked the story Ira Sleeps Over. First of all, it's just a great story, but there are also a lot of great connection possibilities in there. Most kids have been to a sleep over, have a special stuffed animal, mean sister, or are scared of ghost stories.  Love the book and the kids loved it too (surprisingly a lot of my students hadn't heard this one).  So, I read the story aloud and shared my connections via think aloud. Then, students pair shared their connections with each other. After sharing with each other, they wrote their own connections out still following the "When I heard the part about... it reminded me of..."  They did a great job! See an a few examples below.

"When I heard the part about Ira sleeps over, it reminded me of sleeping over at my cousins."

 

"When I heard the part about Ira and Reggie were having a sleep over, it reminded me of when I went to my BFF house." I love how she put my BFF's house! How cute!