Characters - Young Writer's Workshop

Where can children meet a heroic baseball player, get to know a girl growing up in the mining settlements of California, make their way down a crowded street with a man who mends old socks, and join forces with a young girl trying to break an evil curse? These and other fascinating characters come to life in the pages of books (all featured on the front and back sides of the poster, after the Electronic Learning in Your Classroom pullout section).

In these pages, you'll find strategies to help your students create colorful characters!

Mini-Lessons with Ella Enchanted

On the reproducibles (after the Electronic Learning in Your Classroom pullout) Gail Carson Levine shares an early draft from Ella Enchanted and the final version. Following are ways you can teach with these reproducible pages.

* What can students tell about Ella from reading the excerpt? Have them identify words and phrases that reveal the character.

* Challenge students to find and discuss as many revisions as they can. (For example, Gail added two sentences about Ella's father to help set up his character.)

* Launch a mini-lesson on the serial comma. Copy the second sentence without the punctuation and let students read it. Now ask them to read it again with the commas in place. Do the commas make the curing soup easier to imagine?

Characters Lead the Way

That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift. When I cried inconsolably through my first hour of life, my tears were her inspiration. Shaking her head sympathetically at Mother, the fairy touched my nose. "My gift is obedience. Ella will always be obedient. Now stop crying, child."

I stopped....

- from Ella Enchanted by Gall Carson Levine (HarperCollins, 1997)

Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine's first published story, is a Cinderella story with a surprising twist. Though she wanted to retell the fairy tale, she "needed a reason for the character to be so good." So Ella's goodness comes from a fairy's gift of obedience. Try as she might to follow her own will, she must always obey others. You can just guess what happens when the evil stepsisters discover this.

Though set in a make-believe world of gnomes, ogres, and other creatures, Ella seems as real as any child. Here's how Gail creates unforgettable characters.

* Gail asks questions to get to know her characters. Who is this person? What is her room like? What's in her pockets?

* Writing in the first person makes it easier for Gall to be the character. For secondary characters, she steps into their shoes to figure out what they would do.

* As a book develops, Gail plays hopscotch among the characters. When something happens to one, she thinks about how this affects the others.

Choosing a Name

What name would your students give a fairy? For the fairy in Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine thought Lucinda sounded just right. Sometimes Gail gets inspiration for characters' names from people she knows. Other times, she uses a baby-name book. Ask parents to lend you some - they're sure to become favorite additions to your students' writing resources!

Win this Book!

Teaching Writing: A Workshop Approach by Adele Fiderer (Scholastic Professional Books, 1997; [800] 724-6527) offers step-by-step plans for conducting writing workshops. Enter to win one of a dozen copies of this book by sending a postcard by November 1, 1997, to Workshop Giveaway - October, Instructor, Scholastic Inc., 555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012. Please include your name, grade, school address/phone, and a favorite student publishing tip. All submissions become the property of Scholastic Inc. and may be used for any purpose in any publication.

Five-Senses Scavenger Hunt

In What a Writer Needs (Heinemann, 1993), Ralph Fletcher calls them a writer's "most important tools." They're the five senses - and with them your students can add the details their writing needs to paint believable pictures of their characters.

Here's how Gail Carson Levine appeals to our sense of sight to help us picture Ella, her main character in Ella Enchanted.

... I put on the frock Mother liked best. She said the spicy green brought out my eyes. I thought I looked like a grasshopper in it - a skinny, spiky grasshopper with a human head and straight hair.

Read this passage aloud. Then ask: What words help you picture Ella? Follow up with a senses scavenger hunt, letting students team up to scour books they're reading for ways authors use the senses to create characters. Ask students to create posters with what they find, listing each sense along with representative passages from books. (Be sure they include titles and authors.) Bring students together to share their examples, then display the posters to inspire students as they develop characters in their own stories.

Scribbles Take Shape

Daniel Judah Sklar, writer-in-residence for Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and author of Playmaking: Children Writing and Performing their Own Plays (Teachers & Writers, 1991), draws on his experience as a playwright and teacher to help students breathe life into their characters. Here's a favorite activity.

1 Ask kids to scribble until you say "stop." Give them about 30 seconds.

2 Have kids find five images in their scribbles and list them.

3 Ask each student to develop a character profile - including name, age, family, habitat, wish, fear, and so on - for one of the images on the list.

4 Invite kids to draw pictures of their characters, complete wit personified details.

5 Have children write journal entries recounting their characters' daily doings. Encourage them to use specific language in their descriptions.

6 Repeat the entire exercise, having students each create a second character. Guide them in writing plays in which their characters meet and interact.

CONFERENCE CORNER

When Donna Clovis conferences with her students (at Riverside School in Princeton, New Jersey) about the characters in their writing, she focuses on perspective. "Learning modalities have a lot to do with how we see things," she says. By being aware of what individual children pick up on (things they see, hear, touch, and so on), she helps them enhance their characters in ways that come naturally to them. Here's how Donna uses a couple of questions to help one student add details that make her character more vivid.

Donna: Michaela, what do you see in your character that no one else see? Maybe you listen really well so you remember her voice. MayBe you pick up on colors so you have a better idea of what she is wearing.

Michaela: I can hear her voice. She mumbles a lot. And her voice is really low. She coughs a lot, too.

Mrs. Looney has a tattoo. It's an orange heart. She's missing some teeth, and one eye is smaller than the other. She also wears too much perfume.

Donna: I have a better picture of Mrs. Looney now. Do you want to add those things to your description of her?

Show & Tell

Introduce a mini-lesson on feelings by asking students to list some of the feelings they've had that day. Record them on chart paper, then ask: What are some of the ways you show these feelings? (for example, through words, expressions, and so on).

Now look at ways authors show characters' feelings. In Teaching Writing: A Workshop Approach (Scholastic Professional Books, 1997), Adele Fiderer suggests his strategy.

* Have students skim through a story, hunting for words that show what characters are feeling.

* As students to place markers (such as stick-on notes) next to passage that show feelings. Invite students to share their passages, identifying specific words that show the feelings.

Follow up by letting students review their own writing. Ask: What do you know about your characters' feelings? Find places where you show this. Are there more actions and words you can use to show your characters' feelings?

Composite Characters

To give students practice in character development, Donna Clovis, a teacher at the Riverside School in Princeton, New Jersey, developed this character-building activity.

* Donna draws an outline of a face. She has students pretend they've just witnessed a crime and need to describe the suspect to the police. First, they need to create the character. To do this, she invites children to take turns adding features to the suspect's face. Students then agree on a name (Mrs. Looney) and the crime (stealing candy from children).

* With the face complete, Donna gives students five minutes to write a description. The goal is to provide as vivid a description as possible.

Donna's students write descriptions at record speed, discovering a technique many authors use to get to know their characters - drawing pictures first.

Teaching with the Poster

The poster (after the Electronic Learning in Your Classroom pullout section) features excerpts from three books plus tips and activities from the authors. Here are just a few of the ways you can use this teaching tool.

* As you read aloud each excerpt, ask: What do you know about this character? Record students' response on character webs.

* Take a look at dialogue and what it says about a character. For example, what does the conversion between Lucy and Prairie tell us? Use this excerpt to conduct a mini-lesson on conventions of dialogue too.

* Use A Street Called Home to inspire children's own accordian books about the people in their lives.

Creating Characters with Gail Carson Levine

Imagine that when you were born, a fairy bestowed a gift on you. Cool, huh? Well, what if that gift was obedience? In Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine, Ella has been cursed from birth by such a gift. "My gift is obedience" a fairy tells Ella's mother as Ella cries nonstop during her first hour of life. And with a touch of the nose, Ella stops crying. The trouble is that from that point on, she must obey everyone. Even harmless commands like "Eat" become a problem. (What if no one says "Stop"?) Here's one of Gail's drafts of Ella Enchanted. Compare it with the final version.

Trouble began when Mother and I caught cold, two weeks before my twelfth birthday. Mandy dosed us with her curing soup, made with carrots, leeks, lentils, and a hair from a unicorn's tail. It was delicious, but we both hated to see that long yellow-white hair floating around the vegetables.

Since Father was away from Kyrria Kingdom as usual, we drank the soup sitting up in Mother's bed. I sipped my soup with the hair in because Mandy said to, and I had to obey, even though I grimaced at the soup and at Mandy's retreating back.

"I'll wait for mine to cool," Mother said. Then, after Mandy left, she took the hair out while she ate and put it back in the empty soup bowl when she was done.

The next day I was well and Mother was much worse, too sick to drink or eat anything. She kept saying there was a fire in her throat and a woodpecker banging on her head. To make her feel better, I put cool cloths on her forehead and told her stories. They were only old tales about the fairies that I changed here and there, but sometimes I made Mother laugh. Except the laugh would turn into a cough.

Before Mandy sent me off to bed, Mother kissed me. "Goodnight. I love you, precious."

When I was almost fifteen, Mother and I caught cold. Mandy dosed us with her curing soup, made with carrots, leeks, celery, and hair from a unicorn's tail. It was delicious, but we both hated to see those long yellow-white hairs floating around the vegetables.

Since Father was away from Frell, we drank the soup sitting up in Mother's bed. If he had been home, I wouldn't have been in her room at all. He didn't like me to be anywhere near him, getting underfoot, as he said.

I sipped my soup with the hairs in it because Mandy had said to, even though I grimaced at the soup and at Mandy's retreating back.

"I'll wait for mine to cool," Mother said. Then, after Mandy left, she took the hairs out while she ate and put them back in the empty bowl when she was done.

The next day I was well and Mother was much worse, too sick to drink or eat anything. She said there was a knife in her throat and a battering ram at her head. To make her feel better, I put cool cloths on her forehead and told her stories. They were only old, familiar tales about the fairies that I changed here and there, but sometimes made Mother laugh. Except the laugh would turn into a cough.

Before Mandy sent me off for the night, Mother kissed me. "Good night. I love you, precious."

Colorful CHARACTERS

* Lou Gehrig made baseball history - not just as first-baseman for the Yankees, but for his grace and courage as a person.

* Lucy Whipple is a young girl who leaves everything behind for the challenging life in a California mining settlement.

* Sockman washes and mends old socks, carrying them with him on a long wooden stick. He's just one of the people who barter, buy, and sell on a busy street.

You can get to know Lou, Lucy, and Sockman in the stories excerpted here. Find out from the authors how you can make the characters in your own stories come alive too.

The sockman washes and mends old socks and lines them up on a long wooden stick, and he carries that stick on his shoulders. His big blue jacket hangs open, and you can see bundles of old socks in the pockets. He takes old socks and he mends them on the street, and he sings, "Sockman! Pin 'um up, wake 'um up! Sockman gonna fix 'um up!"

MEET THE AUTHOR

The characters in A Street Called Home are people the author grew up with. "they're engraved in my mind and in my heart," Aminah says. Reach into the past to tell your own stories. "Talk with your grandparents or others about your family - or whatever they want to share. Draw and write as they talk," she suggests. Then use what you learn to tell your story. Like Aminah, you can use materials around you to make a book. She paints on bits of fabric that she stitches together, adding buttons and beads. An old piece of wood might make a wonderful cover. Bottle caps, cardboard, and paper you make might also find their way into your work.

"Call me Lucy," I finally said to Prairie.

... " Why?" Prairie said...

"I want it to be my name."

"Why?"

"I don't like California."

"Why?"

"It doesn't suit me - neither the name nor the place."

"Why?"

"Tarnation! I swear if you ask me why one more time I'll chop you up and feed you to the lizards."

MEET THE AUTHOR

When Karen Cushman found out that about 90 percent of the people who traveled to California in the 1800s in search of gold were men, she wondered "What about the other 10 percent, the women and children?" This led her to tell the story of the gold rush from a child's point of view. "How would she feel about outdoor privies?" is just one of the questions Karen asked herself as she developed the character of Lucy Whipple.

Dressed in his Yankee uniform, Lou Gehrig walked slowly to the array of microphones. He wiped his eyes, and with his baseball cap in his hands, his head down, he slowly spoke. "Fans," he said, "for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

MEET THE AUTHOR

While writing this biography, David Adler read everything he could, looking for small and large details about baseball great Lou Gehrig. For example, he learned from a newspaper that it rained the day of Lou's funeral. "That said something to me. Little things like this blend in with the big things to pain a picture."

JOAN NOVELL, a former teacher, is a contributing editor of Instructor.

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