Do you ever have those magical moments during guided reading? Today I worked on character analysis with an advanced reading group. All of the students in this group can read fluently and have good accuracy. So, we mostly focus on vocabulary and comprehension. We read a book called How Not to Babysit Your Brother.
The brothers are perfect to introduce this concept because they have pretty distinct personalities. First, we made a T chart using each brother. Then we went through a list of words that can be used to describe any character. We decided if each word fit the big brother, the little brother or neither.
After coming up with a few words to describe each character, we talked about finding evidence to back up these descriptions. We did this part orally at first, just having a conversation together and looking back in the book. We had to cross out some words because we couldn’t find evidence to support our claim.
Finally, I modeled how I would write about this in our reader response notebooks. We’ll practice this a few more times in this guided format, then I’ll have them do a character analysis independently during daily 5.
In case you don’t use reader response notebooks and would rather have a printable copy, I made these for you to download. You can get it here and here.
