Literary Essays

The third graders at Goethe have started a new writing workshop unit on literary essays. For the past few days we have been reading fiction stories and responding to them in our writer's notebooks. Today students  thought carefully about the characters in these stories. Here are some of the questions we asked to help guide our thinking and our writing:

• What kind of person is this character?
• What is the character struggling against? What gets in their way?
• How does the character change over the course of the story?
• Does the character learn lessons or come to realizations?

Photographer: Taji

When your child reads fiction books at home, ask him or her to tell you about one of the characters. Go beyond what's right there in the text, and use these questions to stop and think!

Students will bring their packet of stories home to read and reread during spring break. When we return to school, students will choose one of their stories and start thinking about a thesis statement for their essays.