The Truck Cat Character Descriptions: National Simultaneous Storytime Activity is a thoughtful and engaging way for students to explore character development in The Truck Cat by Deborah Frenkel and Danny Snell. By reflecting on the personalities, relationships and growth of the story’s main characters, students build comprehension, descriptive writing skills, and emotional insight.

Using clear and supportive templates, students will describe Tinka, Yacoub and Mari—focusing on their traits, behaviours, appearance and personal journeys throughout the story. This resource encourages deep thinking about how characters change, interact and respond to challenges, making it ideal for enhancing narrative understanding in the middle and upper primary years.

Each worksheet includes space for students to respond to prompts about the character’s internal and external qualities, habits, likes and dislikes, relationships and transformation across the text. These targeted questions support students in generating meaningful, evidence-based responses that go beyond surface-level description.

The activity is also ideal for class discussion and modelling. Teachers may wish to explore each character as a group before having students work independently. By incorporating drama, vocabulary brainstorming or visual supports, this task can be easily adapted to suit a wide range of learners and classroom contexts.

Key Learning Outcomes:

• ✅ Describe characters in detail using evidence from a narrative text
• ✅ Reflect on character traits, behaviours, relationships and development
• ✅ Strengthen written expression through guided prompts and sentence starters
• ✅ Build empathy and narrative comprehension through character analysis

What’s Included:

• Character description worksheets with and without clipart
• Templates in 12mm and 9mm line widths
• Prompt questions to support character analysis

Materials Needed:

• Printed worksheet templates
• Pencils or pens
• Copy of The Truck Cat for reference

How to Use:

• Read The Truck Cat and discuss the main characters as a class.
• Guide students through the prompt questions to support thoughtful responses.
• Have students complete a worksheet for each character or choose one to focus on in depth.
• Use modelling, sentence starters and vocabulary supports to scaffold writing.
• Encourage students to refer to specific moments or quotes from the text as evidence.

Ideas for Classroom Use:

• 💡 Use as a follow-up activity to deepen understanding of character development
• 💡 Pair with a character profile display or compare characters across the story
• 💡 Incorporate drama or role-play before writing to build empathy and insight
• 💡 Use in conjunction with the other resources in our The Truck Cat: Book PACKAGE

Top Teacher Tips:

• 💛 Encourage students to highlight parts of the story that support their answers
• 💛 Enlarge worksheets to A3 for younger students or for display purposes
• 💛 Use collaborative brainstorming or think-pair-share before students write independently

The Truck Cat Character Descriptions: National Simultaneous Storytime Activity is a rich resource for building narrative comprehension, empathy and expressive writing. It helps students look closely at the people behind the story and reflect on how character shapes plot and emotion.