Character Unit

How well do you know the characters that you read about? Third graders are learning that readers think about the characters in their stories, in fact readers should begin to care about those characters. To work toward that goal, we will spend several weeks studying characters and practicing skills and strategies that help us understand fiction books better. Throughout this unit, we will be using "Mr. Lincoln's Way" by Patricia Polacco as a shared text to which we can all refer. 

To begin our unit, third graders learned that some characters are main characters and other characters are secondary characters. For example, in "Mr. Lincoln's Way," there are two main characters, Mr. Lincoln and Eugene. They are main characters because they are present in the entire story, and the story is mostly about them. There are also many secondary characters in the text: Eugene's father, Eugene's grandfather, other children in the school, etc… As we dug deeper into the text we learn that in stories, secondary characters influence the main characters in some way. Ask your third grader to share how Eugene's father influences him.

We are also learning the characteristics can be described in certain ways. Mrs. Slotnick taught us a lesson about external characteristics. These are characteristics that are physical. You can see those characteristics just by looking at the character. Soon, we will focus on internal characteristics. These characteristics can not be seen just by looking at someone. You can identify internal characteristics by considering what a character says or does.  

Talk about the characters in the books you read with your third grader. Discuss whether characters are main characters or secondary characters. Remind children that secondary characters are there for a purpose - they affect the main characters in some way.  Identify the characteristics of the main characters and show the evidence you used to figure it out. Ask your third grade reader to describe another character. These ideas can help lead to rich discussions! Happy reading!