During close reading of folktales, students learned about adjectives in order to recognize descriptive writing techniques that they can use in their own writing.

 

To understand different characters’ perspectives and the range of emotion the characters can feel in a single story, students both collected adjectives from the text and generated their own to describe the characters’ personalities and feelings in each folktale.

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They produced “Adjectives Portraits” to illustrate the characters in an Algonquin folktale we read called

The Rough Face Girl. Characters' complex identities were revealed by the students' juxtaposition of adjectives like "beautiful / dishonest" and 

"old / loyal"