Two Reading Passages to Compare and Contrast

I'1000 back for the next part of our character development lesson usingVerdi past Janell Cannon. For this lesson, I will exist sharing how we used the book to compare and contrast two or more characters in a story, drawing on specific details from the text.

To read the first blog post in this series, and to take hold of the free Inferring Character Traits Graphic Organizer, click HERE. To check out my other blog mail service series on grapheme development, click Here and Here!

Since our last lesson on inferring character traits through dialogue, my students learned that in that location are a number of unlike ways that an author reveals information nigh a character in a text. An author reveals information about a character through:

physical traits (both explicit and inferred)
actions
thoughts
dialogue
interactions with other characters

Once my students had a solid agreement of label, we jumped right into comparing and contrasting. While rating and dating our agreement for our Pupil Information Tracking Binders, I apace had students show me their level of understanding for comparison and contrasting. With a quick charge per unit it/date it, I learned that my students had very little background knowledge on this concept. Not a big deal! A quick mini-lesson on comparing and contrasting did the pull a fast one on!

With this ballast chart, we discussed the terms compare and contrast. I guided students with the idea that authors create relationships between characters, settings, and events in a text by developing the interactions amidst story elements. Skillful readers can identify the relationships between story elements by comparison and contrasting them.

While I beloved using venn diagrams, an even better tool (in my opinion) to compare and dissimilarity in the upper grades is a double chimera thinking map.

The reason I like using a double bubble thinking map is because it requires a flake more depth of thought past the students. I beloved that contrasting requires students to think in terms of betoken and counterpoint. I promise y'all they are extremely easy to utilize!

Some guiding questions that students demand to go on in heed in order to compare and contrast and to help them construct their double chimera maps include:

What are the similarities and differences betwixt these two things?
How are these ii things alike and different?
Which similarities do you lot call back are nigh important?
Are in that location any details that are unique to ane thing and not the other?

Fifty-fifty though the standard calls for students to as well compare and contrast settings and events in a text, for this lesson nosotros only focused on characters. After re-readingVerdi an boosted time, nosotros worked together to construct our double bubble thinking map.

Side note: color coding your double bubble thinking map is a not bad strategy for students that may need additional help, especially if this is the first time they are seeing it. I've included this as a freebie that you tin take hold of at the end of this mail.

I think this is such a phenomenal visual that perfectly hits the standard on comparing and contrasting two characters.

Even though we worked together every bit a class to fill up out this double bubble, students also filled out their own.

In one case we filled out the double chimera thinking maps, as a formative cess, students wrote their ain written responses to compare and contrast the 2 characters.

You can grab this free formative assessment and a complimentary double bubble thinking map at the cease of this post!

This formative assessment is a dandy way to quickly gauge your students' understanding of the standard.

Throughout the remainder of the week, students used double bubble thinking maps to compare and contrast the characters in their own cocky-selected texts.

I had to get an extreme closeup of this answer because I have to say, I am pretty impressed with their responses!

On top of that, my teacher centre skipped a beat when I saw this on a student's reading passage! He was annotating the text without whatsoever prompting from me! Best solar day always!

Check out these reading passages and assessments to use in your classroom Here!

Take hold of a free re-create of my Verdi formative assessment and colour coded double bubble thinking map HERE!

Do you need more than passages to help you teach character analysis? Check out my Characters: Differentiated Reading Passages and Questions resource. I provide teachers with 10 differentiated character reading passages. Each passage has five short answer questions for students to analyze characters. Click Here or the push button below to check them out. If yous download the preview, yous can meet the entire resource.