Lesson Plan : Life-sized character analysis
Teacher Name: | Beth Evans |
Grade: | Grade 2 |
Subject: | Language Arts |
Topic: | Character analysis and author's use of literal vs. figurative meanings in words to create humor |
Content: | character, character traits, evidence, emotion, baseball terms (strike, home run, tag somone out, steal home, etc.), literal, figurative |
Goals: | Students will be able to define character traits and find evidence of them in text. They will have a basic understanding of literal vs. figurative meanings. |
Objectives: | Students will work collaboratively and work to understand literal/figurative meanings of words in order to understand American humor underlying the story. Students will be able to rephrase content of a page following discussions of literal vs. figurative meaning. They will begin to use text to support ideas they draw from literature. |
Materials: | Play Ball, Amelia Bedelia! by Peggy Parish, chart paper, butcher/art paper, markers/crayons, sticky notes |
Introduction: | (Students familiar with Amelia created a list to describe her. Introduce baseball terms. Read Play Ball, Amelia Bedelia!) Review list: Who is Amelia? Explain that we will be deciding whether list is accurate. |
Development: | Character traits are those things that say who a character are. They can include things the character does, says, thinks or feels. If I wanted to describe (student), what kind of things would I want to talk about? [Elicit answers] Today we are going to do that with Amelia Bedelia. We're going to see what kind of things the author included to tell us about her. |
Practice: | Take an item from list, i.e. She likes to cook, and find the page(s) where we can see that this is true. Record assertion and page number on sticky note. |
Accommodations: | Students with little ability in English will have greater role in drawing the character. Those with less developed English ability will be able to use pictures rather than text and to use traits elicited during previous lesson. Those at a higher level can be encouraged to create a new category to add to the list as they search for traits and evidence. |
Checking For Understanding: | Students will transfer assertions with page numbers onto construction paper. Follow-up lesson will include peer critique and peer editing of this work. |
Closure: | Students create display and, if possible, present to homeroom classes. |
Evaluation: | This activity would be followed up by book discussions of other works, preferably in the same series, further developing our understanding of the character (and beginning to look into author's craft). |
Teacher Reflections: | This by far was one of our favorite activities. For larger groups, I would create a rubric for presentation and display. |
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