Novel Projects - Characterization

4LB has just finished a round of novel studies/lit circles, and one of the projects I wanted them to do was to demonstrate their understanding of a character from their novel.  I asked the students to take an event from the story, and then try to put themselves in the character's shoes and imagine the scene from his/her point of view.  (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions) in Common Core speak!)

Step one, obviously, is to have students select a character, and then choose a scene that the character had a large part in.  Have students reread the scene so it's fresh on their minds, and then retell the story as if they were the character.  A good scaffolding activity for this is to have students do a character analysis graphic organizer first...something like this:  Character analysis graphic organizer .  This is a little one I made--you can also find a jillion different versions online or customize to suit your own needs.  I just whipped this one up in Powerpoint and saved in my google drive, or you can do it straight in Google Presentations.  Or use mine!

Next, we wrote out scripts for our retelling of the event from the character's point of view.  Students did these in their reading journals.  Then we drew pictures of what we thought the characters might look like based on descriptions we had found in the novels.  Our novels were Frindle, Tiger Rising, and Tuck Everlasting.

Here is a script for Nick from Frindle

A student drawing of Mrs. Granger from Frindle

Next, we used the Ipads to take a photo of our drawings and then uploaded them to the Morpho Booth app.  You can also use the web program called "Blabberize", but Morpho Booth lets your characters look more 3D and I find the sound quality is better.  You can see a finished product here:

Nick from Frindle - by Joseph

Rob from Tiger Rising - by Maria (she used a feature on Morfo booth to change her voice)