Ugly Sweaters and Character Analysis

Ugly sweaters. It's that time of year. During a recent trip to Minneapolis, I stopped at Ragstock, an eclectic clothing shop of mostly second hand and vintage items. Rack after rack touted ugly sweaters. Totally ugly. These sweaters were the original real deal. For most of them, I don't even have words. Holiday related or not, these sweaters were popular back in someone's day.

Ugly Sweaters and Book Characters

I saw an idea meant for middle school about analyzing a book character then designing an ugly sweater according to the character's traits by using color symbolism.  For example, red can represent warmth, love, or anger, and blue can represent cleanliness, peaceful, loyal, or trustworthy. I decided to modify it and have 4th graders give it a try.

Starting the Activity

After reading the book, students thought about the traits their character demonstrated and circled them from the list provided. Then they went back into the text to find specific evidence and examples of those traits along with pages numbers. For this part, students worked in pairs. I was totally amazed with all the rich discussion going on about each trait! They were clearly excited as they thought of the actions and the speech of the character to support their case. This is some of what I heard:

"Remember when she..."
"She was confident because..."
"I think the trait of strength fits because she ripped off the bull's horns!"
"I chose demanding of attention because of the chapter where she's at the circus and she..."

Next, we looked at several examples of ugly sweaters to make sure all students had an understanding of what they were and that some people compete for fun to find the ugliest one. A few students had a different opinion of some of the sweaters and wanted to know where they could get one!

Designing the Sweater

Once the traits and corresponding colors were decided, each student designed their own picture or pattern of a sweater using those specific colors. As long as the design was appropriate, students chose if they wanted to make it holiday related or use a different design.

When the design was finished, they wrote a paragraph explaining why they felt their character would choose such a sweater to wear. Again, they cited some evidence from the text to support their thinking.

The results were some incredibly detailed written analysis of the character as well as some really thoughtful sweater designs. Many students described incidents from various scenes in the book and how they decided to incorporate that into the sweater design.

Very few sweaters actually ended up having anything to do with a holiday. Most sweaters shared many of the same color schemes showing that students seemed to agree on which colors fit the personality of the character.

Since we based our analysis on the character of Pippi Longstocking, students drew everything from the patches described on her clothing...

...to a pirates hat that she probably wore when she sailed on the high seas with her father...

...to Mr. Nillson the monkey character mentioned in many of the chapters.

This is an activity that can be used during any time of year. I also found this to be a fantastic way to assess how deeply a student understood the character and how well and willing, I might add, they are to dig back into the text to find evidence to prove the character traits.

At the end of the activity there were no ugly sweaters to be found, only excited students with lots of great character evidence to share!