Today was the second session of Tom Sawyer and our main focus was on character.
The first thing I had our students do was brainstorm together what a hero is. They wrote down many different character traits of heroes on a large sheet of paper.
I then had them work together in groups of 4 to come up with 5 of the top character traits from their brainstorming.
I wrote the traits on the white board and we compared them to Tom Sawyer. They voted on each of the traits and decided if Tom had the traits of being a hero.
I offered this worksheet for them to fill out and explore more traits and compare them to Tom.
Our next exercise was to have our students do a character web of some kind showing the characters and the relationship between them. The students added several characters right down to the “dead cat”!
Finally, I had some cards with opposites on them:
Honesty, Dishonesty
Integrity, Lack of Integrity etc…
I then had them find examples in the book of these traits, trying first to find examples of both in one character. This was challenging, but some of them found both in Tom Sawyer. We talked about types of characters - Round/Flat, Protagonist/Antagonist etc..
It is amazing how quickly an hour went by. It was then time for the dress rehearsal of Tom Sawyer - next week will be our final lesson and the performance!
The students and our amazing drama leader were having a great time!
