Literary Essay Rubric

In a recent Language Arts unit we worked on writing a literary essay about a main character. Our first example was to discuss the Third Little Pig from the popular fairy tale of the "Three Little Pigs. We worked on this example to understand the format of the essay and how to write a convincing claim. Next, we read a longer story, "Raymond's Run" and together we looked for evidence to describe the main character, Squeaky. Students annotated the text with possible character traits and relevant evidence. Within partnerships they then worked together to craft a claim about the character. We gave them the following visual to help them find a trait and then three reasons to prove this in their essay.

Students worked with their partner to write the Character essay for "Raymond's Run" and then they chose another story from a levelled set we gave them. They then once more worked with a partner to annotate, write a claim, find evidence, and explain their reasoning. Using the Rubric, they assessed themselves and then used the feedback to revise their essays together.

The final step in this unit was for the students to repeat the whole process independently using the character from the most recent fiction novel they have read. Students had confidence with this as they had worked with peers to understand the process and had practiced it multiple times.

Here is the rubric we used.