Character Chart Template

Every reading teacher ends up drawing the same boxes on the board. This character chart template set is those boxes, already ruled, with the heading left to you.

There are fourteen structures here and not one of them carries a printed question. The character tables come in three, four and five columns, the widest of them holding twelve rows so it can serve as a running record for a whole cast across a long novel rather than as a single lesson. There is a comparison sheet whose left-hand column is blank, so the questions two characters get measured against are the ones that matter in your text this week. There is a plain two-column sheet, the one that ends up doing half the work in any reading classroom, and three-band and four-band sheets for when students need to write sentences rather than words. Grids come in three arrangements, two by two, three by two and two by three, because the number of cells and the width of each one change what a student can put in them. Two webs radiate four and six branches from a centre you name. Two timelines run four and five stages down the page, joined by arrows, for tracking anything that changes in order.

Each heading band is a white strip with a rule across it, wide enough to write on with a pen and tall enough to read once written. That is the whole design idea: label a sheet once, photocopy it for the class, and the same ruling serves a different purpose next month. Hand them out unlabelled instead and the choice of categories becomes the thinking, which is often the harder and better task.

Pages print black on white with no filled backgrounds, so a class set is cheap, and each carries a line for the name, the date and the title of the text. The charts are named for characters because that is what teachers reach for them most often, not because they stop working elsewhere - the same grids and timelines serve a science process, a history sequence or a vocabulary sort without any change at all. A character chart template only stops being one when you write a different word on it.