Playground Duty: Teaching Character Traits

Some of my third grade reading intervention kiddos were having some difficulty with character traits. They were having a hard time describing familiar characters (orally and in writing). Since I only have 30 minutes a day with them, I came up with a few quick, small activities.

First, we revisited a few Amelia Bedelia books we had read earlier in the year. After revisiting the texts, we made two webs. One web described what Amelia Bedelia IS and one described what she is NOT.

After this, we decided to conquer a chapter book. (So exciting, but also difficult for my students!) We chose a book with a familiar character, Arthur!

Each day we got through about 1-2 chapters. After each chapter, we did a brief summary of the important event that ocurred in that chapter using a simple chapter grid that I designed. At the end of the book, we talked about Arthur. We discussed how he was in this story compared to other stories, how he was in the beginning versus the end, etc. After our discussion, we filled out individual character traits worksheets. I used this worksheet from Scholastic because I liked how it gave a list of traits to choose from (my kids added their own as well). The next day, we took turns adding character traits to a large web for Arthur. Here are the webs we made for familiar characters:

Now that my students had the hang of describing familiar characters, I decided we should do something fun for Friday. We made our own personal "character" trait webs! The kids LOVED this and their traits cracked me up (handsome, moody...haha)!