Lesson overview

Introduction
Story - Narrative
Middle years and up
narrative
characters
character description
relationships
character history
describing feelings
describing behaviour
narrator judgement
introducing characters
identifying characters
labelling characters
physical description
sensory details
exaggeration
habitual action
internal world
character perceptions
character emotion
describing beliefs
describing thoughts
goals
motivations
summary description
expansion
vivid description
character growth
david walliams
awful auntie
Characters are an essential feature of narrative writing. This checkpoint activity encourages students to integrate multiple ways of describing characters (including physical details, character history, relationships, feelings, and beliefs) to create a rich portrait. We use a snippet from David Walliam's Awful Auntie as a model. This is the last in a series of activities that target different aspects of character description.