My colleague and I delivered the first session of our new virtual writing program last week, and the theme for our session was character development. One of the activities we included in the program outline was a character guessing game, which was a real hoot!
We came up with a handful of children’s books characters, some modern and very familiar, some older and perhaps less well-known. Our motley band of characters included Piglet from Winnie the Pooh, Geronimo Stilton, Harry Potter, Pete the Cat, Garfield, and more. We then described the characters, covering physical appearance, personality and background – what do they look like, what are they like, and what is their life like – and kids had to guess which character we were describing! My colleague put together this awesome slideshow – I can’t take any credit for that!
Here’s the clues we gave for Geronimo Stilton. Some of the descriptors are pretty vague, while others, like the name of his newspaper or his sister, could potentially give his identity right away.
We wanted to provide a lot of detail in these descriptions, not only to increase the chances of kids guessing the characters correctly, but also to encourage them to put as much detail (or more!) into describing their own original characters. We covered physical descriptors, emotional/psychological descriptors, and background/environmental descriptors (family situation, job, hometown, etc.).
This was a really easy activity to put together, so if you’re working with young writers, definitely give it a try with some of your favourite literary characters!
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