Character Descriptions Lesson - Reading, Writing & Grammar Lesson with Activities!

This resource includes everything you need to teach children grades 3 to 6 how to write fantastic character descriptions. The resource is a PowerPoint presentation lesson complete with:

√ Learning objective
√ Success criteria
√ Starter and plenary activities
√ Review of relevant prior learning
√ Teaching input/ information slides
√ Examples of good character descriptions & feature identification tasks
√ Speaking, reading, writing and grammar tasks
√ Explanations and examples of how to use each structural and language feature in your own character descriptions
√ Differentiated consolidation tasks (3 levels)
√ Whole class, paired, group and independent activities
√ Feature checklists
√ Writing inspiration

Learning Objective:
To identify the features of and write my own character description

Success Criteria:
I can read and understand a character description.
I can identify the structural features of a character description (paragraphs, most obvious details described first, describes both appearance, personality and life details).
I can identify the language features of a character description (fronted adverbials, powerful verbs, adjectives, adverbs, figurative language etc.)
I can write my own character description.
I can check my work against a feature checklist.

Lesson details:

• Starter activity - Quick creative writing task
• Review of revelant prior learning - What are characters? Where do we find character descriptions in a story? What tense are stories usually written in?
• Review of revelant prior learning - Adjectives and their importance in descriptions
• Mini-plenary reviewing teaching input
• Speaking and listening task - describing and drawing a character activity
• Teaching input/ information slides - structure of character descriptions (appearance, personality, additional details, most obvious information first etc.)
• Differentiated consolidation activity (3 levels) - structure of a character description
• Reading task - example of a good character description
• Grammar task (differentiated 3 levels) - using ‘was’ and ‘had’ correctly to describe character traits
• Input - language features of powerful descriptions (fronted adverbials, powerful verbs adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions etc.) + consolidation activities (identifying features in the character description)
• Whole class writing task (model/ shared write)
• Independent writing task (writing stimuli included)
• Differentiated feature checklist for each ability level (3 levels)
• Plenary - adjectives game

PLEASE NOTE - Please look at the ‘notes’ section of the PowerPoint for additional information about each slide. These include teaching tips, ideas and further explanations.

This lesson is also suitable for being delivered remotely through online learning with some slight adaptations. It could combine very well with platforms such as Pear Deck and Nearpod.