Character Chart

This character chart set gives a reading teacher fourteen ready charts and asks nothing of the text in return. Whatever your class is reading this month - a class novel, a short story in an anthology, a play, a picture book, a documentary - the same fourteen pages fit it, because none of them names a title, an author or a character.

What separates these from a stack of blank boxes is that the headings do the teaching. One page asks students to sort words into traits and feelings, and to justify the sort from the text rather than from the word itself, because deciding whether stubborn and angry belong in the same category is where careful character reading actually begins. Another page holds two questions apart that are almost always run together: whether a character changes across a story, and whether a character is simple or complex. Those are independent, a character can be complex and unchanging, and students who have never been shown that will happily write that a round character must therefore be dynamic. A third page walks the five signals of indirect characterization one at a time and then asks what the five add up to, so the letters end as a judgement rather than as a collection.

The comparison page prints its own questions down the left-hand side. Two characters then get measured against the same six things instead of producing two unrelated lists that never meet, which is what an unlabelled two-column sheet tends to produce. The final page is a planner: a claim in one sentence, two pieces of evidence, and an explanation of how the second proves the first, with a plain instruction to change the claim if the evidence will not support it.

Pages are one chart each, ruled generously enough to write sentences rather than single words, and printed in black on white so a class set costs almost nothing. A line at the top of every page records the title of the text, so a folder of finished charts is still readable at report time. There is no key, because the evidence lives in whatever the student is reading.