In today’s episode of the Teaching ELA Podcast, I discuss several short stories with a focus on characterization: “The Catbird Seat,” “Leinengen vs The Ants,” “A White Heron,” “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket,” and “The Story of an Hour.” I’ve got an emergency lesson plan you can get on the board right now involving characterization and something from one story in particular that you may not be familiar with.
Short story writers do not have the luxury that novel writers have in regards to character development. The character development in short stories requires conciseness and clarity. In today’s podcast we’ll take a look at short stories that will help you teach characterization (and other things) because we don’t always have time to teach a novel.
Takeaways
- Characterization is easy to teach with a simple 2-column chart that requires students to cite textual evidence and requires students to use this evidence to support analysis.
- The analysis chart allows differentiation for all levels. You change the necessary levels of complexity while getting all students to master the same skill.
- Teaching the skill of citing textual evidence to support analysis makes teaching all other standards either no longer necessary or easier to teach.
Links and Resources
- Characterization Lesson Plans Collection
- “The Cat Bird Seat” at elacommoncorelessonplans.com
- “A White Heron” at elacommoncorelessonplans.com
- “Leiningen vs. the Ants” at elacommoncorelessonplans.com
- “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket” at elacommoncorelessonplans.com
- “The Story of an Hour” at elacommoncorelessonplans.com
The 2-Minute Lesson Plan
Characterization: I can cite textual evidence to support character analysis. The purpose here is to help students understand different ways writers develop characters. You may want to go over the difference between direct and indirect characterization.
Discuss the four ways an author develops characters: (1) direct description; (2) character’s actions; (3) character’s words and thoughts; (4) other characters’ words and thoughts.
- Make a 2-column chart on the board. Title the chart with the name of the character that’s being characterized.
- Label the left column “specific example of characterization.”.”
- Label the right column “What it reveals about (Name of Character)”
- Read whichever story you choose, pointing out possible examples.
- After you read the story, have students collaborate to fill in the right column.
That’s an entire 53-minute or more lesson plan that took you 2 minutes to prepare. Since you’re an actual licensed teacher with a degree and everything, feel free to modify it for your class.
If you need additional ideas/help
- You’ll definitely want to look at the quality of evidence and the quality of analysis
- Regarding the evidence. This can be done with the table chart.
- I have this great Pie Chart assignment with “Story of an Hour” at ELACommonCoreLessonPlans.com. The character pie chart accomplishes the same goals and may be more suitable for some students. Doing them both allows students to find evidence, analyze, and draw conclusions all in one assignment. If you really want to get fancy, you
- You can assign a character analysis paragraph or essay and knock out a ton of writing common core standards too.
Remember our one reading standard that we focus on here at the Teaching ELA Podcast: I can cite textual evidence to support literary analysis.
By citing textual evidence with the 2-minute lesson plan I already shared and with the other characterization lesson plans I put in the show notes, you will naturally be analyzing how complex characters develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme, which of course will naturally lead students to determining a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details.
And of course, if you can do this with literary text you can easily adapt the skill to informational texts and students who are able to master this skill will learn how to better write and organize complex ideas for their writing.
And all of these skills carry over into other subjects.
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