Indiana ELA Standard: 2.RC.3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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.

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 would an igneous rock be like? Would it get along with a sedimentary rock? Could they handle the hot personality of a metamorphic rock?

Add complexity by considering how multiple factors 🔄 Converge within one topic.

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

Every fantasy story has patterns hiding underneath the magic. Once your students see the elements, they’ll spot them everywhere — and use them in their own writing.

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare’s Much Ado summarized in just five minutes!

An animated summary of Shakespeare’s utterly ridiculous “Twelfth Night.”

Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.

If your students’ stories are packed with endless ninja fights or arguments between frenemies, it’s time to expose them to a wider range of conflicts.

A typical student narrative includes plot and characters but lacks a larger idea to hold it all together. This is where a lesson on themes comes in…

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.