Author's Purpose ideas

Boy, I've forgotten how much work it is to start all over at a new school! Juggling the new curriculum, different expectations, commuting, and my boys' flag football schedules is keeping me rather busy!

This week I taught Author's Purpose to both my 1st and 2nd graders. I have VERY little bulletin board space so I used the whiteboard by my read aloud area to display these posters as an anchor chart. Please forgive the awful phone pics, I am lucky I managed a pic at all this week! The kids LOVED the PIE acronym! Thanks Cindy for the cute posters that saved me much needed time!

 I held up various books from our class library for the students to identify the purpose. Persuade is more difficult but I found some examples of letters on Readworks.org that worked well.

We also read I Wanna Iguana and discussed how the boy was trying to persuade his mom in each letter.

I love Gail Gibbons books so I chose Alligators and Crocodiles as an example of Inform but any nonfiction will work. I also took the opportunity to front load about text features.

We enjoyed Shel Silverstein poems as examples of Entertain. My favorite is "Sick" what is yours?

During writer's workshop, the students each chose their own purpose for writing. I have one first grader who is very down on his academic abilities but he was extremely motivated when he realized he could write all about cars. This kid can spout off car stats like an obsessed male adult. Unfortunately I forgot to grab photos of the first graders writing :-( but here are some of my second graders.

INFORM EXAMPLES

Can you tell I have some plane boys?

This guy knew so much about his subject he ended with to be continued... ;-)

ENTERTAIN EXAMPLES

All the authors got a turn sharing their work and the class identified their purpose at the end.

It was a good week.