My son and I love a few certain characters from the books we’ve read aloud over the years. Gum-Baby, from Tristan Strong, Boots, from Gregor the Overlander, Maniac Magee. For my daughter, it’s Junie B. Jones and Ramona from their named series collections. For me, it was always Anne (of Green Gables) I returned to growing up, and Jo from Little Women. Oh, and of course, Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.
Incredible characters are everywhere we turn in literature, and they make such an impact on us. We see through their eyes, experience their transformations, build empathy through their experiences.
Maybe that’s why when I think about characterization, I tend to think about activities that showcase characters visually. That come at them from many angles. That require students to consider their evolution, their growth, their nature vs. their nurture.
Because sure, by all means, let’s talk about what it means to be flat or round, static or dynamic. But then let’s go much further.
Today on the podcast, I’m sharing six creative characterization projects I’ve come up with over the years, in hopes that one (or two, or three) will fill a hole for you. I love them all for different reasons, and I hope you will too.
Characterization Project: The Open Mind
I love the open mind as an inroad to characterization. It invites students to choose their favorite character and really think about what’s going on in their head (perhaps inviting a bit of introspection about the state of their own mind too). This activity allows you to see how carefully your students have read, but it also gives them a chance to express their creativity and leads easily into a whole class discussion of the book.
Here’s how I’d set it up.
Inside their “open mind,” invite students to include:
- At least 3 adjectives to describe your character
- 2-3 key quotations that help define your character
- Desires and dreams
- Strengths, weaknesses
- Personal history and background information that helps define the character
- Analysis of how the character grows/changes/transforms throughout the text
- Key connections and relationships to other characters
- Motivations
- Interests, passions
Then, if you wish, go a step further to incorporate visual and written expression of these ideas.
Ask students…
How might you play with the sizes and locations of various elements to highlight their importance or show their relative lack of importance?
How can you use colors, shapes, or types of text to help highlight what’s inside your character’s open mind?
Can you make use of imagery and visual symbolism to help showcase key elements?
(This project is in The Lighthouse in the Projects for any Novel section, or you can find it on TPT here if you’d like my version).
The Characterization One-Pager
This characterization one-pager template riffs on the open-mind activity a bit, inviting students to choose one key word to put inside the head of each of the four characters they showcase. But then they’ll add more pressing in around them, like a key quotation, relevant symbols or images, descriptors in their own words. By the time they create miniature portraits of four key characters, they’ll have a strong basis to discuss the contrasts and conflicts, as well as similarities and alliances cropping up across the characters in their text.
Character Transformation: Before & After Masks
I just created this project last month, as I was working on a unit for A Christmas Carol, and, as so often happens to me, I just got super into it. Scrooge is a particularly fascinating character to me, partly because he stands out with such force as the only dynamic, round character in a flat and static world featured as a background to his transformation. What fun, then, to showcase his before & after in these theater masks. Whether for Scrooge or any character who experiences a transformation, students can use the masks to draw out contrasts, highlighting quotes, descriptors, imagery, and color in each to highlight the differences between the two.
Showcasing Characterization with 6 Word Memoirs
This character six word memoir is a shorter activity, easy to complete as the springboard to discussion and fun for a wall display. For this activity, students consider a character’s arc – their experiences, evolution, relationships – and then try to boil all of that down into six words. Not easy, I know. The process of distilling a character’s life experiences into six words won’t be easy, but it can naturally lead into interesting conversations around each student’s choices.
Exploring Characterization with a Hexagonal One-Pager Discussion
I love one-pagers, and I love hexagonal thinking, so naturally I love the combination of the two! To put a characterization twist on a hexagonal thinking discussion, have students create hexagonal one-pagers about characters, then jump into creating hexagonal webs showing the connections between aspects and experiences of those characters. You can either stick entirely with hexagons devoted to characters, or have each each student create a hexagon for a character and one for a key theme or symbol to add to the deck.
Quick Characterization Activity: Annotate a Character Image
I think annotating images is fascinating, whether it’s annotating a social media graphic, a meme, a map, a photograph, or a freeze from a film clip.
Inviting students to annotate an illustration or screenshot (from a film version) of a character is a great way to consider characterization.
Once they’ve annotated what they notice about the illustration, ask them to further and layer on details from the text that you can’t see. Then maybe go a step further and have them argue for whether or not the illustration or film portrayal feels like an accurate reflection of the literary character in their opinion.
Ready?
OK, you’re ready to go rock one of these creative characterization activities (or all of them!). Remember, round vs. flat and static vs. dynamic are great places to start, but to help students really dig into a powerful character, launch beyond the checklist.
