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5 Easy Ways to Teach Character Traits and Changes

Understanding characters is an essential reading comprehension skill that many students find challenging. To master this tricky skill, you’ll want to teach character traits and changes by breaking down the concepts into manageable parts that help students learn to infer character traits from text evidence and describe character changes over time.

tips for teaching character traits and changes
Why is Teaching Character Traits and Changes So Tricky?

Students must combine a variety of comprehension skills to make sense of characters. They need background knowledge of traits and what they look or sound like, an understanding of new or complex vocabulary, and the ability to use text evidence to infer character traits based on words and actions. If one area is lacking, they will struggle!

In my Character Traits Pack on TPT, I include multiple activities for addressing each of these areas. Read on to learn my favorite strategies for character analysis!

Focus on Character Traits Vocabulary

Most kids know common character traits like kind, friendly, and honest, but many lack the vocabulary for more complex traits like timid, loyal, generous, or even malicious, gullible, or intimidating! The first step in helping students understand characters is to build up their character trait vocabulary.

Start by charting common terms, but look for opportunities to add more complex and interesting words as they come up in classroom reading. Once you have a good list, it’s fun to play around with the new words. You might describe a character and have students choose the word that best describes that behavior, or even have students choose a known character from a movie and work with a partner to choose matching character traits. How would you describe Hagrid from Harry Potter? What character traits best describe The Grinch?

Reading biographies or conducting biography research also offers wonderful opportunities to discuss traits. Great for integrating social studies and reading!

Teach Outside Vs Inside Traits

Many students confuse physical traits with personality traits. We identify physical traits by using our eyes and describing how the character looks on the outside but we determine personality traits by noticing the character’s thoughts, feelings, words, and actions over time. We use all those clues to draw conclusions about the character’s personality and to track how they change after different events.

character traits anchor chart outside and inside traits chart for teaching character traits

Explain Emotions Vs Character Traits

If a character feels sad in a story, that doesn’t necessarily mean the character has a gloomy or hopeless personality. Students must understand the difference between short-lived emotions and long-term personality traits. This can be as simple as asking, “Are they often this way or just this once?” Help students see that repeated emotions are often clues for character traits.

character traits emotions vs traits anchor chart

Discuss Character Changes with Sentence Stems

Noticing how characters change over time takes repeated practice and lots of discussion. Students must learn to use the text evidence to determine both the change and why it happened. Sentence stems can hold students accountable for thinking through their ideas and expressing them clearly.

In the beginning, I would describe (character) as (trait) because (text evidence).

In the end, I would describe (character) as (trait) because (text evidence).

(Character) most likely changed this way because (describe important event).

In my Character Traits Pack, I’ve included flexible options for easy character study and describing changes over time.

character traits and character analysis pack by teacher trap

Use Short Picture Books for Big Impact

Even in upper elementary, short picture books work magic for powerful comprehension lessons. Students are engaged in the story for its humor or emotion, and can practice naming traits and evidence, or even changes. Below are some of my favorite picture books for teaching character traits, plus a Junie B. Jones chapter book because it works so well!

>>>This post contains affiliate links.  Click here to read my Disclosure Information.
I’d love to hear any other book recommendations!  There are so many great ones to choose from!

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17 thoughts on “5 Easy Ways to Teach Character Traits and Changes”

  1. Love your Inside/Outside anchor chart. It really shows the difference between the two. Students often have trouble with the personality part. Thanks!

  2. Love the charts! Yes, do you create them with the class or beforehand??? What works best. I feel like during would be good, so you can create them with the class. But then you don’t have the time to make it nice and artsy. Thoughts? What do you do?

    1. I do create the charts with the class but since I’m usually rushing and I have terrible handwriting, I often recreate them at the end of the day! (Sounds dumb, but I find it relaxing to pull out my markers and crayons and create a “pretty” version at the end of the day.) Sometimes we’ll just make the “chart” on notebook paper using the document camera or on the whiteboard. That way I’m not wasting 2 big pieces of chart paper every time. 🙂

  3. I am loving these charts to help break down the basics when it comes to understanding characters. I am going to pin this and share it on my article about graphic novels and stepping kids through stages of reading. Thanks!

  4. This is a fabulous post – glad I found it on pinterest 🙂 Going to check out these books – would love to know more books that you have used?

  5. I’ve used the anchor charts and I wanted to use one of the booklets. The Character Traits with the flaps, but the picture of the student one and the one you have available to print are different. The students one has Feelings and the printable one has Physical Traits. Do you have the one that has Feelings? That’s the one I’d like to use. Thanks!

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