Character Trait Vocabulary
If your students are like mine, identifying character traits is tough. They can tell me if a character is nice or mean or helpful, but that's usually as far as they go.
So, I started focusing on this more and made an amazing discovery. No, it's not new, but it was eye opening, at least to me. It's a VOCABULARY issue!!! My students didn't understand what a lot of the more specific character traits meant.
Vocabulary development is a HUGE contributing factor in a student's literacy development. If a child can decode well and read fluently, it's not a guarantee that he/she is understanding what is being read. I took a couple years of German in high school and a bit in college. I can say that I was able to read some simple German words and texts, but I had no idea what those words meant. I didn't have the vocabulary background yet. And many of our students are like that, too.
We spent some significant time working through some character trait vocabulary. We used picture books (lesson ideas coming soon), examples from people we knew, historical figures, character trait growth mind set quotes... anything that would give my students an experience with a new character trait.
When my students had a better grasp on character trait vocabulary, I started using the below activity with novels and read alouds. This pushed them to not only be able to identify more specific traits but caused them to be able to analyze them.
Students have to identify 10 character traits that apply to a main character. Then, they have to narrow down their 10 traits to 5 best ones. This causes some great classroom discussion, as students have to prove or explain why a trait should be kept or deleted.
I usually do this as a class the first couple times to get students used to the activity and to encourage that important discussion. As students become familiar with this process, I let students split off into groups to complete. Then, when we come back together, groups present their top 5 traits. Many times groups will still have a variety of "top 5" traits, but their reasons are solid.
My students don't use "nice" and "mean" for their character traits anymore. And it's pretty amazing to see this transfer over to their writing. But that's for another blog post!
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Happy Teaching!
Martha
