Character and Setting Using Text Evidence

So, as I began writing my first fiction unit for the new year, and planning for my first observation with a new principal, I really wanted to make sure I highlighted the CCSS and our school goal, differentiation.

For this lesson I focused the standard on RL.1.3 describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

I was finding that most of the students are relying heavily on their schema when answer questions about key details in the text, rather than specific text evidence. To tackle this problem I decided I would provide my students with text statements and they would then sort those words based on whether they were describing the characters or the setting.

I chose to use a listed exemplar from the appendix within CCSS - Over in the Meadow. I spread this lesson over three days.  Below is the visual from Houghton Mifflin Treasure's series. This is the version I used with my students.

Day 1 : We read the first 3 stanzas of the poem and discussed the change of setting through out the poem - how the characters all were in the meadow, but in different areas of the meadow. We sorted our evidence by what we saw (picture clues) and what we heard (text clues) to help us decide where and when the different parts of the poems where taking place. Below is a picture of the anchor chart I used.

Day 2:  We reread the same 3 stanzas, this time I had written words from the text on the post-its and purposely distributed words to students. They walked to enlarged posters of the three stanzas and placed their post-it either on the setting or the character, based on which it was describing.  For example, slow would have been placed on the picture of the turtle (character) or night would be placed in the sky (setting) of the owl stanza. We did this lesson again focusing on how we can infer more about the characters and setting. The green post-its are from the text, the blue ones are inferential descriptive words.

Day 3: This time other stanzas were selected for independent practice. I also D.I'ed these by having some student's using rebus readers and other using ones that had no picture clues. They read their stanza and then sorted words from the text under the titles - character and setting.

You can pick up a copy of the three different student formative sheets at my TPT store for FREE.