What Traits Describe You?

A goal in third grade is to understand and describe characters in a story: their traits, motivations, or feelings and also how a character's actions affect the events in a story. We are focusing on this goal while reading fictional stories in class. Before students could start describing others, they became familiar with character traits by describing someone they know better than anyone else: themselves.

After looking at a list of character traits and discussing them as a class, students individually chose traits that they felt best described them. They then had to provide evidence of how or why they exhibit that trait, the same way they would for a character in a story.

I chose to introduce character traits in this way because it gave students a way to become familiar with all the different character trait vocabulary, while at the same time sharing about themselves. By sharing their finished silhouette full of character traits, we all got to know each other better. I really enjoyed both hearing and seeing what the students thought about themselves.