FAST Characteristics

One of the first standards that we are working on this year is RL.4.3 "Describe in depth a character drawing on specific details in a text (eg, thoughts words or actions). I pulled a resource from Pinterest from iheartliteracy. She had used this to teach characterization during independent work time. I worked towards them being able to do this independently.

First we started with last year's standard of being able to identify character traits inside and outside. We began this with interviewing our fellow classmates so that we are starting with something that everyone will be able to access. We discovered that is a lot easier to figure out what the outside of our classmate versus inside our classmate.  The next day we began to transfer our new knowledge to our new chart. We used Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to begin to categorize our thoughts on the main character and his Feelings, Actions, Sayings, and Thoughts.

We worked on this whole group to help familiarize the students with the organizer. We gradually moved students from whole group, to partners, and eventually to independent work.

For the most part this was very successful. Students began to work on inferencing about how a character feels using information from their head and evidence from the text. When they were working independently they would notate where they were drawing inferences from by a I with a circle around it.

I still struggle with how to help students who are have trouble doing this work independently and how they can interact with the standard when they are reading well below grade level. I found Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing online, so that helped some.

This was a good sequence of lessons to give the students some practice in locating and determining details in text through inferencing as well as textual evidence, and being able to describe a character in depth.