Character Traits: Right Side Interactive Notebook Activity

After reviewing the exit tickets, I decided that I needed one more day on character traits.  I still have many students describing their favorite teacher as "blonde" or "tall".  Beyond that, there was still a lot of "nice" and "pretty".  These are the things I'm trying to avoid so we're going to have one more day of character trait discussion about ourselves and then we'll try the text.  

When the students enter the room today, they find their Interactive Student Notebooks and their pictures on their desks. I have to wait just a minute for them to get over the excitement of seeing their pictures and either showing them or hiding them!!

A note here:  Our school gets many sizes of the school picture that goes in the students' permanent records.  I pull these from their file and use them often in projects in my class. For the students who were not in class on picture day, I have them draw a representation of themselves in a frame.

After the ruckus dies down, I share the results of the exit tickets with the class.  I tell them that I noticed two problems- one is that they are still using physical characteristics instead of personality traits and two that they are using little kid words to describe people.  We need to find better words to use.  I take them back to yesterday's lesson where we listed traits on the Smart board slide to describe our principal.  They had used words like "hardworking", "fair" and "strict".  These are the kinds of words I want to hear from them so we do one more example and used Sponge Bob.  I guided the discussion to get them to think more deeply.  We list about 20 words both positive and negative and also the corresponding evidence to support our choices.  

Today's right side activity is going to be an accordion style foldable made from strips of colored construction paper.  I cut the long, large sheets of construction paper into thirds lengthwise.  I cut a variety of colors so the students could choose.

 I modeled with the students how to make the foldable which is simply to fold the short side back and forth like an accordion.  The students then open their notebooks to the right side opposite of yesterday's guided notes activity and glue one square down so that the foldable opens out of their notebook.  (see photo in resource section).  I then have them glue their photo on the square that is glued into the notebook so it's the first section.  I give each student a Sharpie marker to divide all the other sections in half (horizontally works best).  In each of the top sections, I instruct the students to write a personality trait that describes them and in each bottom section, they are to give evidence for that trait.  

I tell the students that I don't care what traits they use as long as they're more "grown up" words and they're supported by appropriate evidence.  They work as I monitor.