LeTourneau Lesson Plan

Name Oshawnda Hines Searcy Class 3rd grade English Literature Date 1-28-23

Lesson Topic / Title:

It’s All in the Personality: Character Traits

Purpose / Rationale:
We will be evaluating book characters and personality traits using text evidence to investigate
the characters behind the writings.

TEKS:
§110.5. English Language Arts and Reading, Grade 3
(6) Comprehension skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts.
The student uses metacognitive skills to both develop and deepen comprehension of increasingly
complex texts. The student is expected to: (A) establish purpose for reading assigned and self-
selected texts; (B) generate questions about text before, during, and after reading to deepen
understanding and gain information; (C) make and correct or confirm predictions using text
features, characteristics of genre, and structures; (D) create mental images to deepen
understanding; (E) make connections to personal experiences, ideas in other texts, and society;
(F) make inferences and use evidence to support understanding; (G) evaluate details read to
determine key ideas; (H) synthesize information to create new understanding; and (I) monitor
comprehension and make adjustments such as re-reading, using background knowledge, asking
questions, and annotating when understanding breaks down.

Instructional Objective(s):

Students will be able to identify character traits by using text evidence and write a small
paragraph analysis about a character in a story.

Materials (for both Teacher and Students):

The Little Red Hen interactive story by Education.com
https://www.education.com/game/little-red-hen/

Character Traits Concept Web Character Study

https://www.education.com/worksheet/article/concept-web-character-traits/

Split Mind Graphic Organizer

https://www.education.com/worksheet/article/character-study-split-mind-graphic-organizer/

Index cards
The Princess and the Pea worksheet
https://www.education.com/worksheet/article/princess-and-the-pea/

The Boy Who Cried Wolf worksheet

https://www.education.com/worksheet/article/the-boy-who-cried-wolf-2/
Crayons, colored pencils, or markers

Anticipatory Set / Focus Activity:

Introduction (10 minutes) Read The Little Red Hen as a whole group. Ask students to think of
words that describe the Little Red Hen. Write these words on the board. Tell students that these
words are called character traits. Show students the Character Traits chart, read the definition,
and discuss how these traits are important whenever you want to analyze, or describe, a character
in a story by using evidence from the text.

Body of Lesson, including Instructional Strategies and Teacher Modeling:

Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling (15 minutes)

EL Beginning Provide and post the definition of the following words, along with an image if
applicable, in L1 and English, for students to refer to throughout the lesson: "character,"
"character traits," "personality," "describe," "adjective." Allow ELs to listen to the interactive
story The Little Red Hen on a computer or tablet prior to the lesson if time permits. Intermediate
Provide another example of a well-known story's characters, such as Cinderella, during the class
discussion to give ELs a more concrete understanding of the topic.
For Spanish speaking ELs, write the cognates for many of the descriptive adjectives from the
story (honest = honesto, responsible = responsable).

Inform students that rarely an author will come out and say a character is cheerful or proud.
Instead, the reader must discover it by analyzing a character's actions and dialogue. After a brief
discussion, display the Split Mind graphic organizer by drawing it on the board or displaying it
with a projector or interactive whiteboard. Using another character from the story, model how to
fill in the graphic organizer by drawing a picture that represents a character at the beginning and
then at the end of the story. Remember to draw pictures that describe the character's actions,
physical traits, or words they used. Write evidence from the story to justify your drawings. Then
write 3–5 sentences that describe your character using the symbols or drawings you made along
with evidence from the text. EL Beginning Provide students with bilingual dictionaries or
glossaries to look up unknown words during this part of the lesson. Words to include are:
"analyze," "action," "dialogue," "explore." Have students rephrase the directions of the sorting
activity to a partner before starting the task. Intermediate Provide a word bank of character traits
for students to refer to, with an image or symbol to match (lazy, kind, polite, brave, rude, mean,
etc.). Choose from these as you model your thinking aloud when you complete the Split Mind
graphic organizer.

Guided Practice

Ask for volunteers to draw other pictures that represent a character's actions, thoughts, or
dialogue in the story and have them show where they find evidence in the text to support the
drawing. Next, as a whole class, write 3–5 sentences that describe your character using the
symbols or drawings that you did along with evidence from text.
EL Beginning Place students into meaningful partnerships (ELs and non-ELs), and have them
discuss the character's traits and search for text evidence before writing the sentences in a whole
group. Intermediate Clarify any challenging vocabulary words from the Split Mind graphic
organizer and provide definitions in L1 and in English. Provide this sentence frame to help
students search for text evidence to support their character trait claims: "When the text says
____, I can tell the character is ____."

Independent Practice:
(25 minutes)
Tell students that in this activity they will be working with their group to analyze a character and
find out who they are in the inside, or to find their character traits, and to fill out a Split Mind
organizer about that character. Review any new vocabulary words they will encounter in the
story that might be hard for them to read. Tell students that as they read the story they must
underline words and actions that might give them an idea of the personality of the character, as
this is the evidence they will use to support their symbols or drawings. Organize your students
into groups of two or three and provide a copy of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Tell students that they should read the story as a whole group and everyone in the team is
responsible for a drawing. As a team, they should come up with 3–5 sentences that will describe
the character using their drawings and evidence. EL Beginning Read aloud the story The Boy
Who Cried Wolf to a small group of ELs, pointing out and defining key vocabulary. Underline
parts of the text that indicate evidence of a character's traits. Intermediate Ensure students have
access to the word bank of character traits, along with images and definitions and the sentence
starters from the previous section. Allow ELs to write their responses using bilingual dictionaries
if applicable. Provide more time for students to complete the writing task.

Closure / Conclusion:
Review and closing (5 minutes) Remind students what character traits are by creating an anchor
chart. Have students share with a partner about their graphic organizers.

Beginning Draw visuals and symbols on the anchor chart that help ELs understand the concept
of character traits. Pair students with another EL that speaks the same home language and allow
them to discuss the character traits in their L1.

Intermediate Provide the following sentence stems to help students discuss character traits with
their partner: "At the beginning of the story, the character was ____, but at the end he/she was
____. This character's traits are ____ and ____ because the text shows ____."

Assessment:
Assessment (10 minutes) Give students another short story like The Princess and the Pea and
have them fill out a graphic organizer on their own.
EL Beginning Define and provide examples for any challenging words in The Princess and the
Pea. Provide a partially completed graphic organizer for learners to complete as an assessment.
Intermediate Pair ELs strategically and allow them to do the assessment together.

Re-Teach Procedures (if necessary);

We can, if some students clearly do not understand the concept, go over as a group and with
board work that I draw, pictures that represent character's actions, thoughts, or dialogue in the
story. Then we can work together in the story to find the “evidence” of this. We can go over as a
class again, writing 3-5 sentences describing the characters using symbols and drawings.

I will pay special attention to my Els and 504 and IEPS for comprehension and adjust
accordingly.
Enrichment Activities:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fables-and-Character-Traits-A-Third-
Grade-Lesson-Plan-and-Worksheet-9185703?st=6f2adcb0fa9ce04b37f818bb87a507ee
Extra credit work for my early finishers

Modifications for Special Needs:

For students that need extra help, give them a story that has the character's traits underlined and
have them come up with their own drawings or symbols and write sentences that explain why
they drew what they did and what they represent about the character. Enrichment: For students in
need of a greater challenge, have them support their writing by giving their opinions about how a
character changes from the beginning to the end of a story and how this might affect other
characters or outcomes in the story.

Self-Reflection:
This seems like a fun idea, and it is not difficult to come up with some more information on the
fly to teach as we go about character and personality. I can clearly see the students being able to
self-identify their own personalities and how they interact with the world through lessons such as
these. I am noticing that I feel somewhat nervous about teaching the English as a second
language students and I see how that would be an impediment to learning the content.
References:
https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/looking-writing/third-grade
https://www.uen.org/lessonplan/view/13891
https://www.education.com/download/lesson-plan/totally-terrific-titles/totally-terrific-titles.pdf
https://www.education.com/download/lesson-plan/its-all-in-the-personality-character-traits/its-
all-in-the-personality-character-traits.pdf
https://thriftyinthirdgrade.com/fun-activities-teaching-character-traits/