A Peek at Last Week!

For the past two weeks we have been focusing on analyzing characters in fiction. This past week we started putting what we have learned into action with character analysis projects! These took a lot of hard work from the students but they turned out great! We worked on using evidence from the text to support our opinions about characters in our reading group books. 

These kids filled their books with sticky notes, marking each and every page when they found evidence. They would come up to me and ask:
"Would "determination" be a good trait for my character?" and I'd say "Well, let's see, do you remember any events in the book that would have shown your character being determined?" and then I would see their faces light up and they'd say "Yeah! I remember a part! It was back in the beginning when he/she......." and so on. I got so much joy from seeing them all beginning to make connections in literature and truly begin to have conversations with their books. When I told them they would be having conversations with their books they all looked at me like I was crazy, but by the end of the week I am sure they all understood what I meant. 

One of the projects that the students had fun with was when we made Character Selfies! The kiddos had to imagine that they were a character from their book and think about what that character would have taken a selfie of. They had to decide what their character's mood would be and why that particular event would have been important enough to that character to document it with a selfie. Here are some of the results: 

We also made character word clouds with the traits describing the characters we chose! They turned out great and the kids really put a lot of thought into them! 

We ended the week talking about all of the things we are thankful for:

I hope everyone had a great weekend and stayed warm with all this wind!