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The Landlady Pre-Reading: The Characters
Prepare your class to read "The Landlady" by Roald Dahl with these pre-reading activities about the two main characters in the story. This resource provides a brief overview of the story as well as excerpts from the text that describe...
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Pop Imagination
Popular culture can pack a powerful punch when it comes to creating awareness around an issue! Teams collaborate to create a pop-culture-themed message during a digital citizenship instructional activity. Part of a vast library of...
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Stories! Imagination! Joy!
Rekindle the art of storytelling through imagination and oral tradition.
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Imagine That!
Enter the fantastical world of "Dungeons and Dragons" and other role-playing games with this lesson from The New York Times. Middle schoolers create the outline for a role-playing game based on their own community. Then, they write a...
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Characters
Are your learners only talking about the plot of the story and not the richness of the characters? Then show them how important characters are to literature with the information available here. The learner will know how authors create...
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Make Up Your Story
Putting together an interesting story can be hard, but this set of worksheets will guide your writers into the depths of their own creativity as they characterize both their main character and villain. Using humor to keep learners...
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Supporting Character Worksheet
Where would Harry Potter be without Ron Weasley? Where would Holmes be without Watson? Where would a good narrative be without an interesting supporting character? Encourage character analysis with this resource, which includes six...
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Chatty Cherry Stories
Young artists will respond to reading children's literature, by engaging in original storytelling and representing their own images through the visual arts. Then they orally describe details of people, places, and things in their stories...
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Giving with Imagination
Demonstrate gift giving as an act of caring about someone versus gifts for show (or gifts from the purse). Elementary learners practice giving gifts from the heart by creating a poem for someone special to them.
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Country Mouse Comes to Tea: Exploring Animal Characters from Tales Real and Fanciful
Students study animal characters. In this language arts instructional activity, students analyze animal characters from a variety of books and create a story using animal characters.
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Imaginative Power - Exploring Superheroes
Third graders identify super human powers and their uses found in comic and cartoon characters, identify use of visual elements such as line, shape, and color, and create drawings of an original super character with at least two extra...
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Lesson Plan 7: The Elements of Story
Budding novelists work on character development by relating to the characters in their stories. They imagine their own hopes and dreams and recall those of characters from books they've read. Learners also consider struggles the...
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Flat Stanley Visits....Your Imagination in Claymation!
In this literature lesson, young scholars read the Jeff Brown book Flat Stanley and collaborate to create claymation characters from the story. Students create a claymation video and discuss using word cards during hte movie.
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Drama from Animal Characters
Learn about animal habitats, characteristics, and writing in a different perspective. The class composes a narrative from the perspective of a fresh water animal, they include a problem and the animal's reaction to the problem. The...
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Flight of the Imagination
Learners study the success of video games by reading an online article. They work in groups to design settings, storylines, characters and technical features for their own fantasy video games. Finally, they write scripts for previews of...
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What a Character! Comparing Literary Adaptations
What do Robert Downey Jr., Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Fritz Weaver, Roger Moore, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Daffy Duck have in common? Why, it’s elementary, my dear Watson! They all have portrayed Sherlock Holmes. Literary detectives...
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Marking Time
Two narrative excerpts tell the same story from different points of view. In the first excerpt (first person), sequencing words and phrases are bolded and learners write down what the bold type does. The second excerpt is in third...
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Analyzing Poetry and Characters
Learners investigate historical context by reading poetry. In this language arts lesson, students discover the work of Michael Longley and examine his poem "Ceasefire." Learners identify the sonnets used in the piece and discuss the...
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Writing Magic
Students write a story. In this writing lesson plan, students are given a series of prompts to promote them in writing a story. The prompts include writing a free write, writing about characters, writing about a setting, writing about...
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Into the Wild: Creating Characters
Students analyze well-known fairy tale characters to learn about characterization. After choosing two fairy tale characters and determining what the characters most want and most fear, students switch characters and stories. They...
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Our Computers, Ourselves: Imagining the Digital Lives of Authors and Characters
The guiding question for this lesson is "Do computers and their contents shape who we are?" Open with a selection of Apple's commercials to introduce stereotypes and people's relationships with their computers. Then, read the attached...
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Lesson Plan 13: Character Interviews on NaNoTV
Kids love to pretend. Use this imaginative energy to develop their understanding of characterization. Class members dress up as a character from their novel-writing project and sit for a filmed interview. In responding to questions about...
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Write Some Dialogue
Students write dialogue. For this character development lesson students use direct or indirect speech to include a confrontation between two characters in their story. Students portray the emotions of the characters in addition to what...
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The "Write" Stuff: Strategies and Conventions for Imaginative Writing
Fifth graders develop and practice the steps involved in imaginative writing. They follow the steps/worksheets included and write imaginative stories of their own.