Unit of Study:

How to Grow Big Ideas About Characters Through Fiction Texts

C& T 4133

Teachers College

By: Farrah Silverstein

And

Kim D’Angelo

Rationale:

This unit of study focuses on growing big ideas about characters through fiction books. We focused this unit around characters because we feel that it works nicely as a center around which other reading skills can be tied. We decided to place this unit in October of third grade because we wanted to allow the first month to be spent on establishing routines, and perhaps reviewing reading work from previous years to allow for a smooth transition. By October, we thought that our unit would work well because it really is building off of ideas that students have been introduced to before, but at a much deeper level. By the time we have begun our unit, our students will already know the structures of fiction books, as this is something they will have become familiar with in previous grades, and additionally, they will have a surface understanding of characters. One of the reasons that we wanted to focus so deeply around characters is based upon observations we have seen in both of our experiences with third graders. In both of our placements, although many of the students in our classes are beginning to make connections to their characters and are attempting to grow those connections into theories, we have found that all too often what they think about their characters tends to be basic. Due to this, we felt the need to push our students to analyze their characters deeper in order to truly connect with their books and engage in a love for reading.

We started our unit with a focus on asking questions of the main characters based on what our students already know about fiction books. We chose to structure week one in this way because doing so allows the students a bit of comfort, as they are building knowledge of their characters based around what they already know about the typical circumstances of fiction books. Furthermore, by teaching our students about the types of things that will illicit strong questions in reading, we are also scaffolding them into what we view as prerequisite steps for further reading skills. By teaching our students to ask questions, we are helping them to focus so they can find the answers (or possible answers) to those questions. We believe that asking questions about characters is the first step that students must take in order to engage in thorough studies of their character using various reading skills, such as empathy, prediction, envisioning etc. When the students question the motives, actions, or personality of their character, they are getting to know their characters and connecting with them at deeper levels.

Week two focuses on the fact that characters are complicated because again, we have noticed that kids usually only look at characters one way and by teaching them that there are various aspects to a character we are broadening their understanding of characters and thus making them more realistic. By understanding that characters are multi-dimensional students will be able to draw upon every aspect of the character. By seeing characters in a more realistic way, readers will be able to liken the character to people in their own lives more easily and use that to predict, and empathize with the actions of their characters.

We felt that week one and week two set our readers up for the skills they would be taught in the following week. We choose to focus week three around empathy and prediction because we felt that students could use these skills to gain an understanding of the complexity and issues that characters go through in such a way that they allow themselves to relate to their characters. We decided to put the two skills together—empathy and prediction—because we saw them as very much connected. We wanted to eliminate the tendency that young readers may have, which is to make prediction synonymous with guessing. We, instead, wanted to teach them that predictions are not random, but rather, they are grounded in what you are learning about the nature of the character and the story. We felt that by teaching them to put themselves or someone they know well in the place of the character, they could better understand where the character was coming from, and thus understand the decisions they make or may make in the future. We believed that focusing on this type of work would make our students predictions more accurate and focused. Throughout this unit, we hope that our students learn to build a better understanding of characters through various reading skills and understand that good readers use these skills to better themselves not only as readers today but as life long readers.

To promote this love for reading, we will teach reading daily between 30 and 40 minute intervals. The first ten minutes of the reading period will contain the mini-lesson and instruction. Then, for thirty minutes at first- building up to thirty-five then hopefully to forty and continue building throughout the year, our students will be reading independently in their leveled bins. The students can pick any character book that we have placed in their leveled bins, to read and take home. The independent books that our students will read in the classroom can also be taken home if they do not finish with the book. We will select books for the unit based on the books’ emphasis on characters. Each bin will contain numerous books with character emphasis allowing for our students to use the skills that they are being taught in the mini-lesson in their own books as they see fit.

After independent reading, students will have book partners and will be encouraged to spend a few minutes sharing what they are reading about, how their character is acting, what they find interesting or different about their character, etc. Partners will be grouped according to levels, which will allow the partners to not only recommend books to one another, but also to comprehend and interpret the meaning of each others books. At the end of each reading workshop, we will have a share and allow students as well as teachers to share interesting things that have occurred within their character books. We feel that by having the teachers involved and sharing as well, the students will learn that reading is something that everyone does and is something that one can maintain through life. Furthermore, by getting both teachers and students involved with this share tradition, we will be accentuating the importance of community in our classrooms, which we see as essential.

To ensure that our students are learning and emerging themselves within the reading workshop and curriculum, we will conduct pre-assessment and post-assessment which contain the same questions, but which are directed at different texts. For both assessments, students will be given a story strongly emphasizing on characters. The student will have to read a short passage about the character and answer questions based on the skills that we are teaching—those being the following: questioning the character and coming up with possible answers, prediction, empathy, and reflection. The students will not be timed and will be given as much time as they need to answer the questions since some students need longer than others. We will evaluate the pre-assessment, and will use the results of these, in conjunction to the observations we make during the unit to establish different small instruction groups. These small strategy groups will not necessarily remain the same; instead they will be based upon our students’ needs. For example, if the results of an assessment tell us that certain kids need work with establishing the main character, we will work on that with them before launching the unit, and if later in the unit we notice that a different mix of kids are having difficulty differentiating between what is important and unimportant in a text, we will pull those kids together for instruction. Small group instruction will be utilized throughout this unit to help us, the teachers, ensure that every child’s needs are being met and every child is getting direct instruction based on their individual strengths and weaknesses.

After the unit is completed, we will give the same assessment (but with a different text) to see if our individual students have grown as readers, and we will be specifically looking to see how their prediction, questioning, empathy, and reflection skills have grown. We will compare each students’ pre-assessment to their post-assessment to see the growth of each child. We will also use these assessments for our own knowledge so that we can see what aspects our kids still need work on, and therefore, what we need to re-teach in ways that may elicit a better degree of understanding from our students.

Throughout the unit we, as a class, will be studying different fiction character books between read aloud books, reader’s workshop and students’ independent reading bins. Our students have just finished reading Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White as their read aloud book. We wanted to use this book throughout the unit as our character study book due to the students’ familiarality with the characters and the book. Although we use this book throughout our reading workshop, we will be reading other character books such as Winn Dixie and Charlie and the Chocolate factory for read aloud. During read aloud we will have turn and talks using the skills that they are learning or have already learned however the main purpose of our read aloud is for students’ enjoyment. We will be reading and analyzing Charlotte’s Web during reader’s workshop to give students examples of the skills that they should be using and to give the lower level students support. By using a previous read aloud book as our reading workshop book, our lower level students will attain the support they need because they will have already heard the section being analyzed and therefore will be familiar with the story. We hope that this familiarity will help them be better able to relate to the teaching points, and to be able to do what is asked of them as readers. By the end of the unit, we hope that our students learn to question the motives of their characters as well as take into consideration all of the outside influences that can effect who their individual characters really are. We hope that they will now take their own life experiences into account when empathizing with a book and realize that reading is a life long journey.

Week, Lesson / At School / At Home
Week 1, Lesson 1 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes
Week 1, Lesson 2 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes
Week 1, Lesson 3 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes
Week 1, Lesson 4 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes
Week 1, Lesson 5 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes ( Fri, Sat, Sun)
Week 2, Lesson 1 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes
Week 2, Lesson 2 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes
Week 2, Lesson 3 / 30 minutes / 30 minutes
Week 2, Lesson 4 / 30 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 2, Lesson 5 / 30 minutes / 35 minutes ( Fri, Sat, Sun)
Week 3, Lesson 1 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 3, Lesson 2 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 3, Lesson 3 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 3, Lesson 4 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 3, Lesson 5 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes ( Fri, Sat, Sun)
Week 4, Lesson 1 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 4, Lesson 2 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 4, Lesson 3 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 4, Lesson 4 / 35 minutes / 35 minutes
Week 4, Lesson 5 / 35 minutes / 40 minutes ( Fri, Sat, Sun)

We want our students to read at home as well as in school. Throughout the year and the unit, our students will strive to boost their reading stamina and therefore, we increase our reading minutes as the unit continues. We expect that our students carry their books from home to school and vice versa giving them every opportunity to read what is expected of them and fill out their reading logs. Each student will have a reading log that travels with them between home and school which allows us, the teachers, to see how many pages as well as how many minutes students are actually reading.

Reading Minutes Chart

Small Group Instruction:

Week 1:

-  What is a main character? How to choose a main character: Readers locate the main character early in their reading so they can follow them, and learn about them throughout the story. In a small strategy group, strugglers will practice this skill by working with short texts. They will turn and talk about who they think the main character is and how they know that/why they think that..

-  Antagonist examples, support- wicked witch, evil step mother, evil step sisters, Cruela D’ville

-  Protagonist examples, support- jack and the bean stalk ( jack), robin hood, 7 dwarfs

-  Antagonist/Protagonist sorts (much like a word sort, readers will read through short descriptions or blurbs from antagonist and protagonist characters and will separate them accordingly). They will discuss what they notice about each type of character (antagonist and protagonist) as a whole.

-  What is a secondary character, what role can they play? Talk to the students about real life examples. How might friends or other people in your life bring out a problem or help solve a problem? We then tell them that in books our main characters have the same kinds of relationships and we call them secondary characters.

Week 2:

- Inference work—What type of person would do this? Actions of character leading to characteristic theories. Students can read short texts and make a chart about what the actions of the character says about who the character is. Start off with high scaffolding and with each example lower teacher support.

-  readers use themselves and put themselves in “ the shoes of the character” to make an educated guess ( Lucy Calkins work)