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English lesson plan · 7th grade (Year 8 in England) · 60 minutes

How characters change

Reading Comprehension

CCSS RL.7.3CCSS RL.8.3England: KS3 ReadingEngland: GCSE English Language Paper 1 Q4

Objective and success criteria

Students will: How characters change.

  • I can answer questions on today's skill on my own, without help.
  • I can explain each step and say why it works.
  • I can check my answer and spot a mistake.

Before and after

Needs first: Character traits and motives

Leads to: Literary analysis: theme, symbol, ambiguity

Materials: A short text or extract (one copy each), Highlighters, Question cards, Mini whiteboards, A short model text on the board, Printed student sheet (below).

Warm-up · 6 min

  • Quick retrieval from earlier learning (Character traits and motives). Students answer on mini whiteboards.
  • Show answers together and note who needs support in the main task.
  1. Even though she was scared of heights, Mei climbed the ladder to rescue the kitten from the roof. Which word best describes Mei? (brave / selfish / lazy / careless) → bravePrompt: What does the character say and do?
  2. Lena kept asking questions: Why is the sky blue? How do birds know where to fly? What is inside the Earth? Which word best describes Lena? (lazy / curious / unkind / bored) → curiousPrompt: What does the character say and do?
  3. Ama saved her pocket money for months, then spent it all on a present for her sick grandmother. Which word best describes Ama? (impatient / generous / boastful / mean) → generousPrompt: What does the character say and do?

Hook · 6 min

  • Read the first lines of a short text aloud and ask what students predict will happen and why.
  • Share the objective: How characters change. Read the success criteria together.

I do: model it · 12 min

  • Work through the example out loud, saying why you do each step, not just what you do.
  • Example: When Ade joined the band, he refused to play any song he hadn't chosen. After a disastrous concert where nobody followed the plan, he began asking the others for ideas – and the next show was their best ever. How does Ade change?
  • Step 1: A character's words and actions reveal what they are like and what they want.
  • Step 2: So the answer is: He learns to collaborate instead of insisting on his own way.
  • Answer: He learns to collaborate instead of insisting on his own way.
  • Pause after each step and ask a student to say what comes next.

We do: guided practice · 12 min

  • Do these together. Students try each step on whiteboards before you reveal it.
  • Use the hints as prompts rather than giving the answer.
  1. When Ade joined the band, he refused to play any song he hadn't chosen. After a disastrous concert where nobody followed the plan, he began asking the others for ideas – and the next show was their best ever. How does Ade change? (He becomes more stubborn. / He leaves the band. / He stops playing music. / He learns to collaborate instead of insisting on his own way.) → He learns to collaborate instead of insisting on his own way.Prompt: What does the character say and do?
  2. Hana laughed at the old man's stories about the war. Then she found his medal and a letter explaining what he had lost. The next time he spoke, she listened in silence. How does Hana change? (She becomes more rude. / She moves from dismissive to respectful. / She forgets the old man. / She starts collecting medals.) → She moves from dismissive to respectful.Prompt: What does the character say and do?

You do: independent practice · 17 min

  • Students work on the student sheet. Circulate and check the first two answers of every student early.
  • Students who finish: write a question of their own for a partner, with the answer.

The 8 questions are on the student sheet below, with answers in the key.

Exit ticket · 7 min

  • Two questions on their own. Sort answers into got it / nearly / not yet to plan the next lesson.
  1. Hana laughed at the old man's stories about the war. Then she found his medal and a letter explaining what he had lost. The next time he spoke, she listened in silence. How does Hana change? (She becomes more rude. / She starts collecting medals. / She forgets the old man. / She moves from dismissive to respectful.) → She moves from dismissive to respectful.Prompt: What does the character say and do?

Watch out for

  • Answering from memory or opinion instead of evidence in the text.
  • Copying a long quote without explaining what it shows.

Support and stretch

Support

  • Review first: Character traits and motives.
  • Use concrete materials: a short text or extract (one copy each).
  • Give the first step of each question, or a partly worked example to finish.
  • Pair with a confident partner for the guided practice.

Stretch

  • Move on to: Literary analysis: theme, symbol, ambiguity.
  • Explain a common mistake in writing and how to fix it.
  • Write a word problem that uses today's skill, then solve a partner's.

Homework and more practice

Free online practice with hints and printable worksheets for this skill: eurekami.com/english/grade-7.

Free lesson plan from eurekami.com/lesson-plan-builder

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How characters change

Name

Date

Score/ 8

The Gardener's Ledger

My father kept two books. The first was the ledger in which he recorded every coin that passed through the shop: the price of flour, the cost of the new awning, the debts that customers swore they would settle by Friday. He wrote in it every evening, in a small, upright hand, and he never let anyone else touch it. The second book I did not discover until after he died. It was a cheap school exercise book, its cover soft with handling, hidden at the back of the shed behind the seed trays. Inside, in the same upright hand, he had recorded something quite different: the date the first snowdrop appeared each year; the night a fox had dug up the tulips; the morning, in 1987, when "M. laughed at the robin on the spade and said it was the bravest bird in England." M. was my mother. I had never heard my father mention her laugh. For forty years, it seemed, he had been keeping accounts of another kind – of small, unprofitable things that added up to a life. The shop ledger balanced to the penny. The garden book did not balance at all. There were gaps of months, sometimes years. In 1993, the year my mother died, there is only one entry: "Rain." I used to think my father was a man who cared only for what could be counted. I sat in that cold shed until the light went, reading his small, careful sentences, and understood that I had been reading the wrong book.

  1. Question 1

    Read "The Gardener's Ledger". How does the narrator's view of the father change?

    • A. from loving him to resenting him
    • B. from respecting him to pitying his business skills
    • C. from not knowing him to knowing only his shop
    • D. from seeing him as concerned only with money to recognising his hidden tenderness

The Margin

Zainab had read the library book three times before she noticed the handwriting. It was in the margin of page 112, so faint she had taken it for a smudge. In tiny, slanted letters, someone had written: "Don't trust the narrator." Underneath, in different ink and a rounder hand, someone else had replied: "Why not?" And beneath that, in the first writer's slant: "Read chapter 9 again." She read chapter 9 again. Then she read it a fourth time, and a fifth, and on the sixth she saw it – a single sentence where the narrator claimed to have been at home when, three chapters earlier, he had described himself on a train. A lie, hidden in plain sight. The whole story tilted, like a picture knocked crooked on a wall. Zainab sat back. She checked the date stamps on the card inside the front cover. The book had been borrowed forty-seven times since 1994. Somewhere among those forty-seven readers were two people who had held a conversation across years without ever meeting. She found a pencil. For a long time she hesitated over the page, feeling as if she were about to speak in a room full of strangers. Then, carefully, beneath the other two, she wrote: "Found it. Thank you." When she returned the book, the librarian frowned at the pencil marks. Zainab apologised. But as she walked home, she wondered who would be next to find them.

  1. Question 2

    Read "The Margin". Why does Zainab hesitate before writing?

    • A. She is afraid of the narrator.
    • B. She does not know the answer.
    • C. She cannot find a pencil.
    • D. Joining the conversation feels like speaking to strangers.

The Attic

The attic door had been painted shut for as long as Daniel could remember. His mother said there was nothing up there but dust and old suitcases. So when the decorators scraped away the paint on the first Saturday of the summer holidays, Daniel was the first one up the narrow stairs. The air was thick and warm and smelt of mothballs. Thin blades of light slid through gaps in the roof tiles and lay across the floorboards like fallen swords. In the far corner, beneath a sheet greyed with age, something waited. Daniel crossed the room slowly. Each board groaned beneath him as if complaining about being woken. He reached out, hesitated, then pulled the sheet away in one quick movement. It was a desk – small, battered, and covered in carvings. Initials. Dates. A crooked drawing of a sailing boat. And there, in the corner, carved more deeply than all the rest, were three letters he knew better than his own name: D.A.M. Daniel Adebayo Mensah. His grandfather. The grandfather who had died two years before Daniel was born, and whom his mother never spoke about. He ran his fingers over the letters. Downstairs, someone switched on a radio, and a burst of music floated up through the floor. Daniel did not move. For the first time, the silence in the attic did not feel empty. It felt like someone waiting to tell him a story.

  1. Question 3

    Read "The Attic". How has Daniel's feeling about the attic changed by the end?

    • A. He is now afraid of it.
    • B. He wants to leave it immediately.
    • C. He thinks it is boring.
    • D. It now feels full of connection rather than empty.

Harbour at Dawn (GCSE-style extract)

The harbour did not so much wake as surrender to the morning. Fog lay over the water like a damp grey blanket that someone had forgotten to fold, and the fishing boats nodded at their moorings, half-asleep, their ropes creaking in complaint. Old Tomas was already there. He was always there. He sat on an upturned crate at the end of the quay, mending a net with fingers that had long ago stopped feeling the cold. His knife flashed, paused, flashed again. Every so often he lifted his head and sniffed the air, as if the sea had written him a letter only he could read. Behind him, the town stirred reluctantly. A shutter rattled up. A dog barked twice and thought better of it. Somewhere a kettle began its thin, rising whistle. The smell of bread drifted from the bakery on Water Lane and mixed with the older, deeper smells of salt, diesel and fish. Then the sun arrived. It did not rise so much as break through – one bright blade splitting the fog, then another, until the whole harbour was suddenly ablaze. The water turned from slate to copper. Gulls exploded upward from the harbour wall, screaming. The boats seemed to sit up straighter. Tomas did not look up. He tied off the last knot, tested it with a sharp tug, and laid the net across his knees like a sleeping cat. Only then did he raise his eyes to the brightening sea, and for a moment, just a moment, his face softened into something very close to a smile.

  1. Question 4

    Read "Harbour at Dawn (GCSE-style extract)". What impression of Tomas does the writer create?

    • A. a cheerful, talkative man
    • B. a lazy man who avoids work
    • C. a nervous newcomer to the harbour
    • D. a steady, experienced man deeply connected to the sea

Inheritance

When my aunt died she left me her piano, which was the one thing in her house I had never wanted. It was an upright of dark, scarred wood, too large for any room it had ever stood in, and it had been out of tune for as long as I could remember. As a child, I had been made to sit at it every Thursday while she counted the beats aloud in a voice like a ruler rapping a desk. I had hated it with the pure, uncomplicated hatred of a nine-year-old. The removal men groaned it up the three flights to my flat and left it in the hall, where it blocked the light from the only window. For a month I edged around it sideways, as one edges around a guest who has outstayed their welcome. I told friends I would sell it. I photographed it twice for the listing and deleted the pictures both times. It was during a power cut in February that I finally lifted the lid. I could not have said why. The flat was cold and dark and silent, and perhaps I simply wanted to hear something. I pressed middle C. It was flat, of course – everything about that piano was slightly flat – but the note hung in the hall far longer than I expected, and something in the slowness of its fading undid me. I played the only piece I still knew, a dull exercise in C major that my aunt had made me repeat a hundred times. My fingers found it before my mind did. Halfway through, I realised I was counting under my breath, in her rhythm, in her voice. I have not had the piano tuned. People ask me why, and I tell them I haven't got round to it, which is true in the way that most convenient answers are true. The other reason is harder to explain. Every flat note is exactly as she left it. I am not ready to correct her yet.

  1. Question 5

    Read "Inheritance". How does the narrator feel about the piano at the start?

    • A. indifferent, having never seen it
    • B. delighted to finally own it
    • C. resentful, because of unhappy childhood lessons
    • D. proud of its value

  1. Question 6

    Hana laughed at the old man's stories about the war. Then she found his medal and a letter explaining what he had lost. The next time he spoke, she listened in silence. How does Hana change?

    • A. She forgets the old man.
    • B. She becomes more rude.
    • C. She starts collecting medals.
    • D. She moves from dismissive to respectful.

  2. Question 7

    At the start of the year, Leo refused to join any club. By June, he was captain of the chess team and organising the school tournament. How does Leo change?

    • A. He goes from withdrawn to confident and involved.
    • B. He stops liking chess.
    • C. He becomes lazier.
    • D. He does not change.

  3. Question 8

    When Ade joined the band, he refused to play any song he hadn't chosen. After a disastrous concert where nobody followed the plan, he began asking the others for ideas – and the next show was their best ever. How does Ade change?

    • A. He learns to collaborate instead of insisting on his own way.
    • B. He leaves the band.
    • C. He stops playing music.
    • D. He becomes more stubborn.

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Answer key: How characters change

  1. 1. D. from seeing him as concerned only with money to recognising his hidden tenderness

  2. 2. D. Joining the conversation feels like speaking to strangers.

  3. 3. D. It now feels full of connection rather than empty.

  4. 4. D. a steady, experienced man deeply connected to the sea

  5. 5. C. resentful, because of unhappy childhood lessons

  6. 6. D. She moves from dismissive to respectful.

  7. 7. A. He goes from withdrawn to confident and involved.

  8. 8. A. He learns to collaborate instead of insisting on his own way.