Character Traits - It’s who a character is on the inside - their personality. It is shown through the character’s actions and words in a story. Seems simple enough, right? WRONG.
Teaching character traits is hard work. But for our young learners understanding character traits is often challenging and so we’ve occasionally oversimplified. But not anymore! We have found these 5 keys work for laying the critical foundation of understanding character development through teaching character traits.
Select engaging read alouds. Get into character or find a YouTube video of someone else getting into character if that’s not your thing (no judgement here - we do it often). It is important that you choose books with illustrations that tell more of the story, too. Stop and think aloud as you read - things like “Hmm… he/she seems to be caring. I can tell this character is caring because…” allow students to see YOU verbalizing character traits and using the book to defend your thoughts. These are powerful skills for our students to have, and the more they see/hear it in action, the more confident they’ll become with it, too.
- Vocabulary! If you’re anything like us, you take students’ understanding of character traits for granted. We sometimes assume our students know words to describe someone’s character when in fact, they don’t. Modeling and using these important vocabulary words throughout the day and during those great read alouds will help develop this crucial vocabulary in your students. You could even have a “Word of the Day” to incorporate this into your day; words like: confident, determined, honest, brave, caring, or rude could be used to springboard your students’ learning about character traits.
Teach about emotions. So many times students choose to describe a character’s trait by the way the character is feeling. BUT we’ve got to get our kiddos thinking about the bigger picture. Understanding the emotions of others is SO STINKIN’ IMPORTANT and having empathy is vital, but talking to your students about the difference in emotions and personality is important to understanding a character’s traits. Embed high quality social skills instruction into your high quality read aloud time and teach about feelings. Then compare feelings to character traits. Trust us… it will make a world of difference. Here’s some books we like to use for this:
Give students a visual reminder. The anchor chart below is what we use to remind our students about inside and outside character traits. You’ll notice that we use anchor charts a lot. We love having a visual reminder to refer back to when we are reviewing skills. We’ve noticed our students really use those anchor charts, too. We display ours all year after we make them with our students. We just use push pins and attach them to our ceiling tiles. Easy, engaging, and effective.
Make it personal. There’s so many ways to anchor your students in the text when talking about character traits. Make your own connection to the story, then let students share their connections - “Chester the Raccoon reminds me of my son because he was very nervous to start Kindergarten. Did anyone feel the same as Chester when you started school? Did your mom help you like Chester’s mom helped him?” We know that making text to self connections are key to comprehending, but it also makes the learning so much more fun! Then, when your students are ready, have them brainstorm inside and outside character traits about themselves and their friends in the classroom. Hearing the students support and encourage each other will melt your heart.
If you’re interested in seeing these things in action, check out our Character Traits unit on TPT; just click on the picture below. It’s a TWO WEEK unit with daily lesson plans, formative assessments, read alouds, and a summative skills assessment.
So, what do you think? Do you have anything in mind that you would add to this list? We’d love to hear from you in the comments or on Instagram (@flockstarteachers). In the mean time...
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