Bend 1 Session 2E (Argument) Characterization

Growing Big Ideas From Details about Characters

Connection: Remind students of the previous session tell them that today they will be working similar work, but on a larger scale.

Open your notebooks to the page where you wrote your revised essay about the 'Three Little Pigs,' and look it over, ask yourself one very important question: What did I learn from doing that essay that I can use again, when writing a more intellectually ambitious essay?

We are not going to talk about them right now but carry them with you, because starting today, you are going to work on a much more ambitious character essay.  Your essay will take 4 or 5 days to write, and it will be a lot better than the essays you whipped out yesterday.  But the process of writing these essays will be largely the same, it helps to start by thinking about the big claim that you want to make bout the text--and in this case, about the character.

Show chart of:
How to Write a Literary Essay about Character

Today I want to teach you that to get big ideas about texts-and eventually grow those ideas into a literary essay-it pays to notice important details the author has included about the character, and then to reflect on the author's purpose for including a detail, and to jot down those thoughts.

Teaching:

"Good books don't give up their secrets all at once." -Steven King

This tells us that there is great reward in paying attention to the details in stories, that if you do, you will uncover the big ideas that make the story important.  

In this BEND you will be writing essays about characters, paying attention to the details of a character is an especially important thing to do because characters are people.  Just like you can't know everything about a person the 1st time you glance at them, you can't know everything about a character the 1st time you meet the character in the pages of a story.  

Today we will learn about Characterization

Use what you have learned from the movie Frozen and Characterization and apply that to any character from your New Text.  This will help in your analysis part of your essay. Journal 1-2 pages about your chosen character.