Characters Matter

Strong readers get to know the characters in their books. Getting to know the characters, in our books, provides a variety of benefits for our students. First, it leads to increased engagement in the story. When a reader strives to get to know a fictional character, they need to “step inside” the text. They actively engage with the text as they interact with the character on a personal level. Second, as students attempt to understand the character’s personality, thoughts, actions, and feelings they develop their critical thinking skills. To deeply understand a character, students must use skills such as reasoning, making inferences, interpreting, and synthesizing information.  

You can support your child in getting to know fictional characters, when reading at home, through the strategies listed below. 

Empathizing: Walking in Our Characters’ Shoes

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. Feeling empathy for characters is a strategy we use to support our students in deepening their comprehension of a story. When a student feels empathy for a character, they are making a personal connection. Learning to feel empathy for characters requires the child to imagine how they would feel if they were in that situation. 

Often feeling empathy for characters requires inferential thinking. Students must look for clues in the text regarding what the character says, does, or what happens to them. They then think about these clues and predict how the character might feel. They use text clues and their own experiences to infer what the character is most likely feeling. This process exercises their critical thinking skills. 

To support your child in empathizing with characters, when reading at home, you can use the prompts below.

• How do you think the character is feeling? What makes you think this? 
• How would you feel if this happened to you? 
• Have you ever experienced something like this?  
• How did you feel?

Character Traits

Character traits are the words used to describe a character’s personality. Identifying character traits requires the reader to use inferencing skills. Making an inference invokes the skill of reading between the lines. Often readers must look for clues in the text, by analyzing what the character does and says, to identify character traits. They must make a  judgement based on the textual evidence about the character’s personality. 

When identifying character traits, we want our students to be precise and specific. Using blanket adjectives such as “nice”  or “good” is not as beneficial as using specific adjectives such as “compassionate”, “helpful”, or “patient”.  We also need to support our students in differentiating between a character’s traits and a character’s feelings. 

You can support your child in developing their ability to identify character traits by prompting them to draw conclusions about a character’s personality when reading. One method is to stop reading when a character trait is made clear either through actions or dialogue and take a moment to analyze their personality. You can ask your child “Did the character say or do anything that gave you a clue about their personality?” “What character trait do you think they have shown?” Remind your child to support their conclusion with evidence from the text. 

For example, while reading the text The Paper Bag Princess, you could prompt your child to describe Elizabeth’s personality after she tricked the dragon to save Ronald. “I think Elizabeth is clever because she tricked the dragon into becoming too tired to keep Ronald prisoner.” 

Understanding Characters’ Wants and Problems

Good readers understand that characters are complicated and have layers. When reading, we try to gather as much information as possible about the character. One way readers come to know the characters, in their books, is through identifying and thinking about their “wants” and “problems”. When reading at home, encourage your child to identify what the main character wants or wishes for and the problem which they experience in the story. 

Predicting Problem Solving

As our students now know, fiction stories contain a problem and a solution. When we  read fiction, we should expect that the main character will face a problem and strive to solve it. The most exciting part of the story is often watching the character explore their options for solving their problem.

The problem and solution in a fiction story provides an opportunity for our students to make personal connections to the story and practice their inferring skills. Each time we read a fiction story, we want to encourage our students to make predictions about how the main character will solve their problem.

You can prompt your child to predict how the character will solve the problem by asking:
 

• What would you do if you had this problem? 
• How does this character usually act? What do you think this character will do to solve this problem?