Why do people and characters act as they do? Require your class figure out the motivation of two people or characters they read about in a given text. In the short charts, pupils note down who, what they do, and why they do it. After each brief analysis, they must note down why they think that is the motive.

Concepts

character motivation, characters, drawing conclusions, conclusions, textual evidence, evidence, inferences

Show More Show Less

Additional Tags

draw conclusions, infer, inference, textual evidence, character motivation, english language arts

Show More Show Less

Pros

• Does not overwhelm students with too many boxes or characters to analyze; you could easily copy this back and front and look at the motivation of four characters
• Works with any text

Cons

• You may wish to white out the portion that provides teacher instruction
• The worksheet is very basic and may need additional scaffolding for success with all learners

Common Core

RL.4.1 RL.5.1 RI.4.1 RI.5.1 RL.6.1 RL.7.1 RL.8.1 RI.6.1 RI.7.1 RI.8.1