5 speaking and listening activities to explore characters and motive

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An important part of reading is exploring characters and the role they play in a story. Empathy is a key word here – children have to be able to put themselves in a character’s shoes and think about their motives and emotions. 

This can be difficult, especially for younger children, but empathising with book characters and considering why they chose this course of action, or what the consequences would be if they chose another, is a great way to develop a wide range of thinking and communication skills. 

Below you’ll find 5 classroom activities which will help your students explore and empathise with the characters they're reading about. They work best with primary age pupils but there’s no reason why older students won’t enjoy them too.

The activities are all adapted from Ros Wilson’s fantastic Ideas for Big Talk (Andrell Education). Download the full booklet here.


Activity 1: Thought tracking

Freeze! What are these characters thinking?
(Image: clicksphotography.net)

This technique supports children in examining the private thoughts of characters at certain points in a story (particularly tense moments work well here). 

Have a group of students recreate a scene from a book as a freeze frame. The rest of the class make a circle around the frozen character(s) and each student says what he/she thinks one of the characters in the freeze frame is thinking at this moment in the story.

To keep a permanent record: Photograph the freeze frame, print out the photo and stick it in the centre of a large piece of paper. The children can draw thought bubbles from their chosen character and write down their imagined thoughts.


Activity 2: Interior monologue
The purpose of this activity is to encourage children to think on their feet about continuity of thought, in role as a specific character. 

First, ensure students know what a monologue is – a prolonged talk by one person, usually written as if they are talking to themselves. Next, students either talk through the illustrations of a book as a character, or talk over a film clip where a character is not saying anything.

This activity can be quite intimidating. Have students work in pairs at first and then let the more confident kids perform their monologues.


Activity 3: Book gossip
We all like a good gossip! In this activity, children are given a situation from a story and work in pairs to role play as two minor characters talking about what they think of the main characters and what they are up to. 

This is a great way to explore less prominent characters and also develop a rounder picture of the main characters.

"You'll never guess what Harry and Ron did yesterday.
Hermione was fuming!"
(Image: nnhs65.com)

Activity 4: Who said what?
Give children examples of dialogue from a story. Can the children decide who said what? 

For example, who would say, ‘I want the kingdom for myself rather than for my brother and sisters!’? Is it Bob the Builder, Harry Potter or Edmund? 

Children have to explain why they think that character is the one who said it. Pick more ambiguous quotes and characters from the same book or film to increase the difficulty of this activity.


Activity 5: Mirror, mirror
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? 

Have students work in pairs. One plays the magic mirror, the other plays a character from a film or book. The character asks the mirror what it thinks the consequences of an action the character is considering taking may be. For example, Edmund from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe may ask: ‘What will happen if I take my brother and sisters to the White Witch?’ 

Do you dare ask the enchanted mirror for the truth?
(Image: disney.wikia.com)

Remind the students that the enchanted mirror in the story of Snow White NEVER lies. It tells the truth, whether that’s what the characters want to hear or not. It also doesn't give yes or no answers. Students playing the mirror should give an explanation of what they think may occur should the character choose that certain path and why.

This activity is a great way to encourage kids to ask open-ended questions and to consider the alternative directions a story could have taken. If the children haven’t read the end of the story yet, it can also be a good prediction exercise.

You might need to initially model the role of the mirror yourself, before splitting your class into pairs and/or larger groups to ask and answer their own questions.

Read Ros Wilson's article 'A creative approach to the new curriculum' for more ways to keep creative even under the new curriculum's restrictive impositions.

How afterschool film clubs encourage thinking

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And the best thing about 3D films?
Those funky glasses. (Image: filmclub.org)

Film clubs provide young people with a rare opportunity to be part of something fun, creative and sociable. Sabrina Broadbent reports on an exciting initiative to give more children the chance to get involved.

Ask anyone over the age of 40 if they had a film club at school, and the chances are they will tell you that they did and it’ll be hard to stop them telling you what they saw. They’ll remember the teacher, the magic of having a familiar space transformed into a screening event, and they’ll always remember the film.

Sadly, those film clubs in the 60s and 70s rarely lasted long - sourcing the film reels was difficult and expensive, lacing up the projector was complicated, sound systems were unreliable and the teacher usually worked alone without support or encouragement. Nevertheless, the films that were screened remain as memorable events in the minds of the young people who saw them.

What is a film club?
A film club, like a reading group, is an intimate and informal gathering where people can encounter ideas, experiences and emotions that may not be everyday topics of discussion but which shape all our lives.

Film is a vast vault of stories stretching back one hundred years, across every continent and told in every language. It is an extraordinary cultural asset, yet British children see practically nothing of it. The theatrical releases represent a tiny and culturally skewed percentage of this archive of creative and intellectual endeavour.

Since its roll out in Spring 2008, FILMCLUB has curated and made available thousands of films to state schools. The idea behind FILMCLUB, brainchild of film director, Beeban Kidron and educationalist, Lindsay Mackie, was to give every child the chance to watch one film a week, free of charge, from beginning to end, with a chance to talk about it afterwards.

Now that both the technology and distribution methods are at a point where a model film club could be reproduced in as many schools in the country that wanted one, Kidron and Mackie decided the time was right for school film clubs to become a government-funded entitlement for all school children.

There are now over 7000 film clubs across all four nations of the UK, reaching over 200,000 children and young people every week. Based on a general survey with film club leaders on the impact of FILMCLUB, teachers report that the educational and social benefits to the children attending are considerable. 81 per cent say it develops children’s critical reasoning skills, 80 per cent say it makes children more positive about school and 81 per cent say that it integrates isolated or disengaged children.

An opportunity to be a part of something
Cinema, like theatre, was originally a social act – a collective spectatorship of a story played out upon a stage or screen. Sitting together, but apart, in the darkness and the warmth was integral to the experience. Many people experience film quite differently now and viewing is often an isolated act – on computers and phones. FILMCLUB is changing that.

‘A lot of the disaffected kids are smiling – you don’t often see those children smile,’ observed one teacher from a secondary school in Hastings.

A film club is one way that a school can help children to feel a part of something, not apart from everything. Inclusion is a central aim of many teachers’ film clubs, and headteachers are quick to see that a film club can make children more emotionally receptive to learning.

A film club audience is a unique, self-selecting group of children. It’s unusual to find a grouping quite like it at any other time or place in the school day. It cuts across age, class, ability, gender and ethnic boundaries and it is often a magnet for curious, shy and unusual minds who find their way each week to sit in the dark to watch what film writer, David Thompson, calls ‘the frenzy on the wall’ – who linger afterwards to listen and share their thoughts on films as diverse as Wall-E, Spirited Away, Madagascar, Shaolin Soccer, Mad Hot Ballroom and The Story of the Weeping Camel.

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