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Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.

Showing A Character’s Trait

We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.

Changing A Plot’s Order

A plot puzzle that works with any story you are already teaching: which events could trade places?

Do Narrators Have Too Much Power?

Imagine being a character in a story. Are you worried that your story’s narrator may inaccurately describe you? What if they reveal something you wanted to be kept secret? Do narrators have too much power!?

Author’s Voice: Jack London

Every great author sounds like no one else. Students learn to hear an author’s voice with Charles Dickens’s dramatic A Christmas Carol, then borrow Jack London’s rugged voice, turning a flat, boring passage into writing that sounds just like him. It is reading like a writer, and it is the kind of thinking your strongest readers are hungry for.

Shrinking A Summary

Can your students shrink a whole story down to one sentence? Every cut reveals what is truly essential.

Literary Technique: Juxtaposition

Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!

Summarize In Haiku

Can your students fit a whole story into seventeen syllables? In a haiku, every word has to fight for its spot.

Analyze Character Change

A character can act one way at the beginning of a story and surprise you by the end. Students gather the clues and name the change.

Identifying A Story’s Theme

Teach your young students to identify the moral or the theme of a story.

Too Much or Too Little of a Character Trait

The trait that makes a hero heroic is the same trait that makes a villain villainous. There’s just too much of it, or too little.

Stories with the Same Problems and Solutions

Have you ever noticed that some stories have awfully similar problems? What if we looked for the most unusual way of solving a repeating problem?

Motivation and Moral Development

Can someone do the right thing, but for the wrong reason?

What’s In My Brain: Primary Sources

Two columns. One is an example, one isn’t. Can you figure out the hidden rule before the big reveal?

Comparing Characters’ Bedrooms

What item’s in a character’s bedroom would reflect their deepest desires? And what if they toured a similar character’s room?

Introduce Symbolism with Pixel Art

Create a pixelated icon that represents the essence of a character!

Describing Author’s Voice

What if… Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

A Character’s Challenges and Changes

Your 1st and 2nd graders will analyze how a character responded to a challenge.

Personification: A River

A river that chases, chuckles, and grips things with a gurgle. Your students will see how a writer turns plain water into a living creature, then try it themselves on fire, snow, or traffic.

Not Like The Others: Charlotte’s Web

Four Charlotte’s Web characters. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

Comparing Characters

Your young students will compare how two characters have changed in a story.

Summarize In Haiku: Power

Can your students fit a whole story into seventeen syllables? Now do it from inside a character’s head. Then once more, following the power.

Main Idea and Details

Young students can use this big idea organizer to identify the main idea and support it with details.

Analyze Character Change with Depth and Complexity

Anyone can say a character changed. Your students will prove it: four details from the beginning, four from the end, and the two traits those details point to.

Analyze Characters Using Philosophy

What is the Brick Pig’s philosophy? How would he apply it to the characters in Harry Potter?

Characters’ Faults Can Also Be Strengths

Strength and weakness are often two sides of the same coin. Students will explore how a character’s flaw can be a benefit.

Characters Dressed as Other Characters for Halloween

What if one character dressed up as another for Halloween? Would the Cat in the Hat pick Captain Jack Sparrow, because they’re both chaotic yet good-natured people? Would Elsa dress up as The Ice King since they are both lonely?

Better Stories Part 4: Character Archetypes

Are students’ characters a bit flat? Archetypes give them a strong foundation on which to build their own characters as well as a tool to analyze existing stories.

Author’s Voice: Rudyard Kipling

Every great author sounds like no one else. Students learn to hear an author’s voice with Beatrix Potter’s calm Peter Rabbit, then borrow Rudyard Kipling’s playful voice, turning a flat, boring passage into writing that sounds just like him. It is reading like a writer, and it is the kind of thinking your strongest readers are hungry for.

Think Like A Philosopher

What would Socrates have thought if he watched Frozen?

A Character’s Playlist

What playlist of songs best goes with a character’s change over time?

Virtue or Vice?

Aristotle noted that positive traits and negative traits are often the same thing, but just in different amounts. The right amount is a virtue, but too much or too little and it’s a vice.