Your How to Teach Character Traits Guide

Best lessons, activities, books, and videos to teach character traits in your 3-5 classroom including mentor text for character traits.

How to teach Character Traits?

Lessons on character traits begin inherently in vocabulary and can be in either fiction or nonfiction texts.

Analyzing how characters think, feel, and act (depending on the point of view) students can infer traits about that character and see the character grow or change throughout a text.

Modeling is so important for character traits!

I love take my favorite books to teach character traits and analyze one character together building our vocabulary.

Moving to small group and independent work including activities to teach character traits would be next.

What are passages to teach Character Traits?

The best character traits mentor texts to teach character traits (in my opinion!) or a great starter list of model texts to begin your class study of character traits.

Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters is a an excellent book to teach character traits. With multiple main characters to follow it is easy to track growth and see traits with examples throughout the book.

A Bad Case of Stripes is another classic when it comes to lessons for character traits. Camilla, her family and even the doctor have behaviors that lend themselves to traits students are able to see.

Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt – between the historical tale and the characters students can relate to this book is such a winner! SO many examples of character’s actions that would be perfect!

Golem – you might not have heard of this one for teaching character traits!

This tale rooted in Jewish history really helps students see the whole picture of a character the good and bad that make up Golem even in a short picture book.

Sam Johnson and the Blue Ribbon Quilt is another fantastic book to show creative characters and problem solving all wrapped in a tale students will be eager to reach the conclusion of.