Understanding Character Unit Update

Wow!  December 14th already.  Time is flying  - as it usually does this time of year.  Everyone is so full of energy leading up to the winter break.  The trick for me is harnessing and focusing that energy in a productive way!

In class we are in the thick of our Understanding Character unit.  We started out with a little sociology about how we interact and interpret one another.  More specifically, what our brain does when we encounter new people.  As a part of this we also took a personality assessment - one that helps to show which personality traits are strongest in each one of us.  The point of that is to show how all of our interpretations of one another are unique and "clouded" by our own personality traits.

After several days of this type of work I could sense that the kids were beginning to question how this tied into reading...so we moved on to small bits of text that asked the kids to read and gather information about some characters and then rank them.  This generated great discussion, and by focusing on the differences between rankings I made the connection back to our sociology activities.  We interpret and analyze characters exactly the same way we do with people; the trick is being consciously aware of it when we read.

We then switched focus and looked at character from an author's perspective.  Author's rely on six techniques to develop their characters:

1. Characters' Actions
2. Characters' Body Language
3. Characters' Language/Speech
4. How others relate to characters
5. Characters' Physical Description
6. Characters' Thoughts

Students had practice activities using very short excerpts of text which focused on one of the six techniques.  Students identified examples and then made impressions based on the evidence of each technique.  At this point we are moving into looking at examples of the techniques in other works.  We read the poem "We Real Cool," by Gwendolyn Brooks and created impressions of the characters based on evidence from the characterization techniques.  Today we started reading a short story called "The Elevator," by William Sleator where we will analyze the main character, Martin.  From there we will move on to longer works of literature with less guidance from me on identifying the examples of characterization techniques. 

This Understanding Character unit is a lengthy one and has a lot of material to it, but understanding and interpreting characters is probably one of the single most important skills when it comes to reading and comprehending literature at a high level.  This also follows my personal educational philosophy of going into great depth on fewer concepts.

I hope everyone has a great holiday season - the hustle and bustle is reaching its peak!

Questions and/or concerns?  Drop me an email or give me a call.