The Content of OUR Character

We have spent a lot of time talking about character traits in the people in the books we are reading.  Our current book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane offers a fun lead character (a china rabbit named Edward) who changes over the course of the entire book.  Edward is selfish and has no use for love…until his life takes a very drastic new path.  As the book progresses, kids will see how he changes and we will discuss the many ways his personality changes, along with his view on LOVE.   We constantly reflect upon what is happening in the book and how we feel about Edward.  Last week, we began a new project that asks them to think about THEIR character and how they want people to see them.  What do they like?  What character traits best describes who they are?  Here’s what we did:

In our Writer’s Notebooks, we created a rough draft of our self-portraits.  We also started a list of character traits (this list can always be added to as the year progresses).  The final self-portrait is then done on a piece of white construction paper.  This is then cut out, and placed on a piece of colored construction paper.  They then write their character traits around their portraits.  In the coming week, we will continue to work on our characters by adding sentences that describe US.  These will be mounted on the bulletin board in our room.