Character Collage Creation

how to deepen understanding of character traits & motivations...

Raise your hand if you've ever asked yourself, "How can I deepen content knowledge beyond the surface level? How can I make it interesting so the kids actually pay attention?? How can I ensure the students LEARNED the lesson?" Ok now that everyone is raising their hand.. you can put them down (hahaha).

Basically teachers everywhere are constantly searching for ways to deliver the information in a way that the students receive, connect with, and reproduce. Easy right?? Noooooooooottttt! It's impossible to knock all the lessons out of the park with deep comprehension... even in our best weeks of creativity and action. But here's one we think you (and you and you and you!) could immediately implement into your classroom to tackle the subject of characters within fiction stories.

We try to include at least one ACTIVE and ENGAGING project or exploration based activity into our week.. within subject/content areas. Over time, we have come to realize (see previous blog posts) how imporant these days are to the overall comprehension and understanding our students take away from our class. Most recently here in fourth grade we have been working through the novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. The wealth of characters, decisions, arcs, settings, problems, and solutions make it a perfect book to study in depth. We specifically have been looking at characters.. their traits and their motivations. We discussed these topics throughout the first 3/4 of the book through round table and whole group discussions. We assessed overall story comprehension in various ways.. but when it came down to the last few chapters we asked ourselves, "How can we make sure they understood these characters? Can they show what they learned?? What is the best way to get them involved, enaged, and proving they connected with the content?"

Well! The answer was: Character Collage. In a character collage we look at character personality & physical traits, motivations, and change over time by pulling quotes from the book and clips from magazines/newspapers! Here are the steps!

1. Assign groups of students (or individuals if advanced!) to specific characters from your book study. Characters should be prominent enough that they have a lot of material to gather ideas from.

2. Have students write the name of their character at the top of their poster or paper. This can be designed by them.. with pencil, pen, colors, or magazine letters!

3. Students should then gather a quote from the book that gives insight into their character's traits and/or motivations. For example, one of our students chose, "Let's go explore!" from Peter.

4. Following the quote, the students should come up with 3-5 character personality traits that clearly show their character's disposition and overall archetype.

5. The fun begins-- have students use a variety of magazines to cut out words, letters, symbols, photos, objects, etc. etc. that represent their character. We made a requirement that our students HAD TO have a photo (either drawn or from a magazine) that looked like their character as well.. pulling on those physical character traits.

6. Fill up the white space!! Give the students enough time to create their collage.. filling up as much space, in a visually pleasing way, as possible.

7. Present posters to the rest of the group!! Everyone should have acquired knowledge of all the main characters by the end of the assignment. Woohoo!!

Throughout the assignment we continually remind our students to go back to the book and search for key details and textual evidence for their various ideas. And boy did we have some creative responses!! For Edmund we had a group create devil horns on the E of the written name and an angel halo over the nd. This represented his character arc moving from spiteful to humbled and helpful!! Edmund's poster also had a man dreaming of becoming king! For Aslan we had groups use weights for strength, speakers for his booming roar, and references to spring and summer for his melting of the endless winter. Friends, these are just a few of the creative things our students came up with.. things we hadn't even thought of ourselves!!! Did some groups struggle more than others.. yes.. and that showed us exactly where we need to revisit in the future.

So-- overall.. this activity was able to support learning in the realm of characters, as well as show learned comprehension. All of that in a unique, active, and engaging way that the students will continue talking about for weeks or even years to come!! That's always the goal.. and this week we think we might just have achieved it :)

Take a look at some more examples below!! And check out our other active approaches to content learning for more ideas!