The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Character Traits

This past week we used an amazing book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, to learn about character traits.

This book is about a 14-year-old boy, named William, who builds a windmill in his drought-ravaged village in Africa bringing electricity and running water.  William is truly a hero that students can relate to.  William shows that no matter how young you are, with creativity, determination, and hard work, you can save your world!

While reading, students recorded character traits to describe William and we paused to record them at the beginning of the story, in the middle, and at the end.  Here is what our chart looked like when we were done...compliments of my student scribe.

Afterwards, students selected the 4 best character traits to describe William and then defended their reasoning for selecting the character traits with evidence from the text.

Students published their writing in a fun windmill display for all to see.

I organized all the graphic organizers, worksheets and templates that I used in this mini-literature pack for the book, available at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  I also included a few extended response worksheets for students to practice writing about reading in preparation for state testing.

Check out the book!  It's the perfect addition to your Black History Month read alouds!