Reading

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

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

What would Socrates have thought if he watched Frozen?

How do characters from novels line up with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?

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

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?

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!?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Your students will use Depth and Complexity to note how a character’s main trait changes across a story.

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

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

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