ELA Activity: Character Analysis Diagram

Analyzing complex characters in a novel or a short story requires students to look at many things such as how they’re described physically, but also their motivations for their actions and events that happen, their reaction to external factors, and the relationships they have. 

This graphic organizer provides students with two things: the artistic visual of the character dependent on the descriptions in the text, and then analysis-level questions looking at the relationships, motivations, and reasoning behind the character’s actions. 

This four-side graphic organizer strategy has great benefits for students because it doesn’t leave a tone of white space to be filled, but also allows them to analyze four separate questions, which gives the teacher lots of data to see where the students’ strengths are with topics and which they need to model or teach more in-depth.