Author Johanna Baker-Dowdell shares her own love of story characters and how this has been translated into an engaging and memorable classroom activity. Lucky students!
Some of the characters I discover in the
books I read stay with me for years because they have been written in such a
way that captivates me.
Great characters have me holding my breath
as they take on a challenge, cheering when they succeed and crying with them
when things don’t go to plan. Favourite characters from my childhood reading
include The Velveteen Rabbit, Wilbur,
Charlotte and Fern from Charlotte’s Web
and anyone created by Roald Dahl.
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Noah and Ethan Baker-Dowdell were very excited when their copy of Race To the End of the World arrived in October last year. |
Following on from my previous post about
storytelling with preps,
I wanted to share a characterisation session I put together for my son Noah’s Grade
3 class.
Reading did not come naturally to Noah at
first, but he always loved books and the stories they contained, so I knew he
would find his own way of deciphering the words eventually. With some help from
his school’s literacy teacher and reading at home, between us we fostered a
love of reading that I’m sure will last Noah’s lifetime.
In the past year Noah has devoured most of
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books,
all of Andy Griffiths’ Treehouse series
and several graphic novels, but one book that completely captured his
imagination was the first from A. L. Tait’s MapmakerChronicles.
Earlier on this year I had discussed the
possibility of speaking to Noah’s class about writing with his teacher and she
suggested we talk about characterisation. Since Noah had enjoyed Race To the End of the World and the
main character, Quinn, was a similar age to the class, I thought he was the
perfect character for us to discuss.
To get them into the mood for our characterisation
chat we discussed the front cover of the book and I read the Prologue from Race To the End of the World to the
class. I spoke about the ways an author develops a character, including writing
about their appearance, how they are feeling, what they are thinking and the
words they use when speaking. Next, I gave the class a page filled with quotes
from that passage (see below) and we discussed what we could tell about Quinn’s
character from the actions and words.
Action/Words
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“After
that it hadn’t taken them long to realise that Quinn remembered everything.”
p. xii
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“He
could describe in detail the contents of each peddler’s cart that regularly
visited the farm…” p. xii
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“…they
were careful to keep the secret of Quinn’s memory from the rest of the
village.” p. xii
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“Quinn
had run as fast as he could to get to his own mother…” p. xiii
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“Your
mother says you can read, and write.” p. xiii
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“I
don’t want to go.” p. xiii
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“The
fact is that it takes a special person to create maps.” p. xiii
|
The class consensus was that Quinn is smart
and clever, has a good memory, is hiding a secret, gets scared and nervous and
has a special skill that not many others share. After talking about Quinn’s
traits I asked the class to draw a picture of our leading character, which
resulted in some intriguing interpretations (one Quinn was a vampire), and was
a fun way to wind the session down at the end of the day.
When Noah and I walked home from school
that day he told me his friends were excited about the characters they could
create in their own narrative storytelling and they wanted to read the Mapmaker Chronicles too. Anything that
inspires children to read and write stories is a great thing in my book.
Johanna is a freelance journalist and
author of the book Business & Baby on
Board.
Blog: http://johannabd.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohannaBD
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