the ART of learning: Characters in CONFLICT!

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Characters in CONFLICT!

Finding the conflict/problem of a story can be tricky for kids and has always seemed to be a difficult concept to articulate to my kiddos ... but NOT ANY MORE!!

Enter: That Teaching Blog and her FABULOUS sequence of lessons that teach all about they different types of conflict and plot. Gotta admit, my reading lesson plans for the week were basically just my print offs of her blog post!! The cool part about the whole situation was that she shares that she "stole" this lesson from another incredible teacher! That is definitely the neatest thing about being part of the blogging community - the willingness and desire to share so that through each other, we all become better teachers! So thank you both for your great minds and generous hearts!

Got this from pinterest but ... I can't find out who I "borrowed" it from!

The prep for this lesson was a little time consuming on my part - but it was nothing a little evening of Heart of Dixie couldn't turn into a relaxing couch activity! I cut out lots of pictures from magazines that demonstrated different "conflicts". At the beginning of the lesson, I handed each of my table groups a baggie with about 15 pictures inside. Their first task was to discuss and classify them together under the four types of character conflict. We also talked about conflict being internal or external.

Next, I assigned the groups a conflict type then had each student individually choose a picture and determine what type of conflict it was, whether it was internal or external conflict, and explain what clues the picture gave them to make them believe that.

I am a HUGE fan of sentence frames/stems! Not only are the FAB{ULOUS} for struggling writers, they help give kids a framework to explain their thinking as well as offer a useful means of getting students up and running with academic language and vocabulary words and phrases in their language and in their writing.

Then, as groups they made collages of they clippings and cards to hang on the wall.

The kids really did a great job with this activity and were able to articulate the four types very well! The posters have been a great visual for us to remember what we’ve learned and use as quick reminders of the types.