Looking for an author’s purpose lesson that your students will truly enjoy? Well, today is your lucky day! In this post, I’m going to share one of my favorite ways to teach the five author’s purposes (Persuade, Inform, Entertain, Explain, and Describe), and for this weekend only, you’ll get my paper bag book for teaching author’s purpose for FREE! This post is part of a blog hop called, Sharing Our Blessings, and it’s all about celebrating our gratitude for you, our reader(s), and for other important parts of our lives.
I love the month of November and the reminder it gives us to focus on gratitude. I look forward to time with my family and am grateful that we can be together, for our dear friends who are like family, for our fur babies and grandbabies (we adopted a golden doodle named Millie this year, and our kids have three dogs between the two of them), and so much more.
To celebrate Thanksgiving and to show my gratitude for the hard work teachers are doing every single day, I am joining with this group of TPTers to share paid resources for free just for this weekend. I’ll share a few ideas related to my two free gifts. Towards the bottom of my post, I added a button that you can click to access a PDF with all of the resources and links to the posts. There are a total of 24 paid products for FREE valued at $87.45 for each teacher joining our blog hop. Plus, you have the chance to win one of 14 $25 gift cards to Amazon, Starbucks, TPT, Target, or Walmart…total value $350.
Now…here are a few ideas for your author’s purpose lesson…
What to Include in Your Author’s Purpose Lesson:
Attention Grabber to Introduce Your Author’s Purpose Lesson:
When teaching author’s purpose, the first thing I do is connect to real life examples. Sharing familiar texts and having students group them could lead to author’s purpose connections. You might have your students work in teams to sort text examples. You may not even give them the five author’s purposes to begin with just to see if they make the connections on their own.
Explain the Five Author’s Purposes
The second step of your lesson should be to explain each purpose and how they differ with the others. Kids need to be able to recognize the language used not only for reading, but also for writing. As writers, they organize their writing based on the purpose and use specific words for that purpose too. You can use the the first part of my paper bag book for reference as you teach them, and your students can refer to these notes later too.
Analyze Text Examples to Determine the Author’s Purpose
The next part of the paper bag book refers to text examples. You will need to pull back out the books you started with and choose one for each purpose. Mark text examples with sticky notes to share with students to model why a book fits the author’s purpose or have your students work in teams to do this with more of an inquiry type approach. Discuss.
Use the Author’s Purpose Sorting Mats to Continue Practicing and for a Formative Assessment
The last part of the lesson includes a sorting mat and various text example cards. Students work to determine the author’s purpose of based on the text description. This can be done as a group or individually.
Other Ways to Work on Author’s Purpose:
Of course, you will need additional ways to solidify your students understanding of author’s purpose. Here is a list of follow up activities you might try:
- Analyzing Text for Clues: Model and practice analyzing short passages or chapters, using sticky notes to mark text evidence (words, phrases, sentences) that supports the determined author’s purpose.
- Writing for a Purpose (Doughnut Challenge): Challenge students to write a story or passage on the same topic (like a doughnut) but for a different purpose (e.g., persuade someone to buy it, inform on its ingredients, describe its taste, entertain with a story about it).
- Skits and Role-Playing: Give small groups a topic and a purpose (e.g., “persuade your class to get a class pet”) and have them create and perform a short skit. The rest of the class identifies the purpose.
- Book Order Sort (for primary grades): Use old scholastic book order catalogs. Have students cut out book covers and paste them onto a three-sectioned paper labeled “Persuade,” “Inform,” and “Entertain.”
- Library Scavenger Hunt: Have students visit the library or use the classroom library. Using only the book’s cover, blurb, and table of contents, they try to find X number of examples for each purpose.
Get Your Copy of My Author’s Purpose Paper Bag Book:
As mentioned, I am sharing this file for free over the hop weekend. To get the download, simply click the button below and join my email list. It will be sent to your inbox.
Other posts you might like:
- 5+ Effective Ways to Teach Author’s Purpose to Young Learners
- 7 December Books and Activities That Inspire Creativity
- How to Analyze Author’s Craft using In November by Cynthia Rylant
Are you a primary grades teacher?
I don’t want to leave you out! I have a unit for teaching with the book, A Turkey for Thanksgiving, that I know you and your students will enjoy. You could use parts of the author’s purpose lesson to compare and contrast A Turkey for Thanksgiving to nonfiction articles about turkeys. However, there are other lesson ideas within the unit too. I hope you can use it this week! Use the form below to sign up for my list, and the unit will be shared with you.
Finally, I’d like to share my gratitude with a gift card giveaway.
We used to have the option to use an app called Rafflecopter for our giveaways. However, they have gone out of business. This year, I will be choosing my winner from the emails that are submitted through my opt in forms. The winner must have an active email and be on my list to win. I will use random name picker to select the winner and will email all who joined my list to announce the winner on Tuesday. Good luck and I hope you enjoy these gifts as I KNOW how busy you are. I hope you know how much I appreciate all you do in the classroom and for your students.
To help you keep track of the sites that you have visited, here is a spreadsheet with all of the links and a list of resources hosted on each page:
VISIT THE OTHER BLOGS FOR MORE GREAT RESOURCES:
Have a Happy Thanksgiving and safe travels if you are visiting family.
