"Eleanor and Park" Character mapping

Student level: 4D de la eso

In this simple English language arts activity, I led a character analysis on the two main protagontists in the book "Eleanor and Park," which students in a relatively advanced 4 de la eso English class were reading. As we discussed the two main characters, I created a bubble map on the chalkboard to help students visualize the character's qualities. Starting with two bubbles: "Eleanor" and "Park," we expanded the map out as a class, putting qualities that the two characters shared in the middle, connected to both of them. The visual aid also helped expand each quality in the discussion: i.e. adding more details to Eleanor's "hard family life" quality. The activity easily took the entire class period and we could have continued for hours. It was a good entry point into discussion the book as a whole, because following character development can be one of the more difficult aspects of reading fiction but it is one of the most important in making sense of the story/plot.

The prep for the activity was pretty simple, I just read the same chapters of the book as the students and made a little sample bubble map for myself so that I could anticipate different directions the discussion might go and figure out which important points I wanted to steer students toward.