In this unit, students will think deeply about their characters and learn essential skills such as making inferences, building theories, and learning life lessons by “walking in the shoes” of their characters. At first they will learn to live as a character and later they will step out of that character’s shoes and reflect and grow big ideas about that character. In order to help students develop their skills at predicting, envisioning, and reading with fluency we will first teach students to “wear the shoes of the characters and inhabit the world of the book.” Next, students will be encouraged to think deeply about their character's personality quirks and habits, by considering what a character holds close, the character’s complexities, and the way the secondary characters act as mirrors of main characters. In addition, they will learn to infer and develop ideas about character's traits, motivations, troubles, changes, and lessons. The third portion of this unit will shift children from inferring about characters to interpreting characters and growing theories about them. The goal for this portion of the unit is have children’s theories build in complexity. Finally, readers will think between books, comparing and contrasting characters who play similar roles across several books.