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📖 3rd Grade · ELARL.3.3Unit 2: Characters: traits, motivations & actions

Motivations

Google Classroom

🎯 Objective: Students explain why characters act as they do.

Lesson outline

  1. Read aloud; chart what the character wants and why.
  2. Discuss how wants drive actions.
  3. Students chart a character in their own book.
  4. Exit: one motivation with evidence.

Lesson 2 of 6 in this unit. In the Lesson Planner this lesson takes 1–3 class periods depending on your timetable: day 1 introduce & model, then practice, small-group reteach and a quick check.

📐 Standard

RL.3.3

Common Core State Standards for ELA, Grade 3 — typical US scope & sequence (literacy block)

🏁 Unit goals

  • Describe characters’ traits, motivations and feelings
  • Explain how their actions affect events

✅ Check for understanding

End with the exit ticket in the outline. Sort answers into got it / almost / not yet and start the next lesson with a 5-minute reteach for the “not yets”.

Practice & resources on Thinkabara

🎯 Practice: Character traits📚 All 3rd Grade skills📚 Read-aloud stories⚡ Capy Live class quiz

🗓️ Plan the whole year like this

Add 3rd Grade ELA to your free Lesson Planner: enter your timetable once and every period shows the next lesson, skipping weekends and school breaks.

Add to my planner See the year’s sequence

More lessons in “Characters: traits, motivations & actions”

  1. Character traits
  2. Motivations
  3. Actions and events
  4. Point of view
  5. Chapters build on each other
  6. Central message

Something to improve in this lesson? Tell us.