Inspiration Software

Character webs and Inspiration capture essence of Macbeth

"I've developed a plan of what I want to happen,"said Mrs. Broadhead. "But even my best students seem to need more time to understand Shakespeare than they do for other pieces of literature."

Character webs represent one way in which visual learning can support reading comprehension. Using character webs helps students justify their impressions of literary characters by citing specific evidence from a given text. Making character webs helps students understand the characters more fully by linking their actions, motives, and even their interactions with other characters.

Using an Inspiration template, students can easily start a character web. The new Inspiration 6 templates - all 35 of them - now include a quick "how to" section to help students and teachers get started.

To create a character web about Lady Macbeth, students simply select Template under the File menu. They then select the Language Arts - Character web. This template gives them a starter document for mapping out the key characteristics of Lady Macbeth. After putting her name into the main idea symbol labeled "Primary Character," students then enter her characteristics into subsymbols, linking to examples and supporting details from the text.

While reading the play, students continue to work with, edit, and add to their character webs. And at the same time, they use other graphical organizers to organize and investigate the other components of the play.

Inspiration also gives Mrs. Broadhead the ability to create templates herself. For example, she might create a template for her students to use as they map out the scenes of the play. With Macbeth as the main idea, and each scene as a subtopic, students can quickly capture and organize the events of each scene.

To create this template, Mrs. Broadhead decides the type of graphical organizer she'd like her students to use. Then, she can either customize it for Macbeth or leave it more open-ended so that it can be used with any play. When she is done creating the topics and subtopics, and has customized the colors, symbols, and font, she clicks on File and Save as Template, naming her template "Language Arts - Scenes of a Play." Now, when her students open the Scenes of a Play template, they are ready to capture the important elements of each scene.

Using graphical organizers to study the scenes, characters, metaphors, and concepts in Macbeth helps Mrs. Broadhead's students understand the play more fully. The new templates in Inspiration 6 makes getting started easy while keeping the students' focus on the play.

Back