Narrative Basics Lesson 1: Characters

About Standards
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
Purpose
Teach students to create rich character descriptions through, including their relationships, histories, feelings and behaviour.
Description
This lesson looks at different ways we can describe characters, from stating their name to describing the relationships to passing a narrator's judgment. We bring everything together in a checkpoint piece that features a complex, extended description of a character. We use middle years-friendly texts by David Walliams and Roald Dahl, however the lesson content will work for older students. This lesson contains 13 writing activities and will take most students 2-3 hours to complete. UPDATE: If you want to assign individual pages from this lesson, search for "character activity".
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