Learning Lessons With Amy Labrasciano: Author's Purpose

Boy is this week going to be fun!!! We are going to take some very difficult standards or level 3 cognitive difficulty standards to be exact and turn them into a week of hands on engagement. This week will also kick off a week and a half of monsters, bats and spiders!!!! Our ultimate goal is to have students understand strategies that will help them to identify the main purpose of a text, including what the author wants to explain. In order to do this, we will start the week off with a quick fact and opinion lesson. The students will work as a whole class to sort fact and opinion about a lovable green monster named Harry. Once they have the hang of it they will work in small groups to synthesize the information and write their own facts and opinions about another lovable monster named Sally (Harry and Sally! lol) The class will come together to wrap up the lesson with a little information about how author's use information and their opinions to write pieces. The next day will be a tiny detour from monster fun to read a piece on dental health. While it doesn't stick with the theme, it does a great job of guiding students through the whole standard with a purposeful text and aligned questions. Don't worry, you'll read below that students will spend time in writing doing awesome monster activities! We'll finish off the week with bats and spiders. The students will have to independently show that they understand the standard by writing and opinion piece and explaining it's purpose.

Just for reference, if you don't know I use the letter t for teacher and ss for students in my outlines. Also, you can get the lesson plan templates that I use from A Modern Teacher.

We are going to read the mentor text How To Catch A Monster on youtube this week. The students will be working on the writing crafts of vivid verbs and adjectives while writing a narrative. We'll kick the week off by having the students write a very detailed description of their monster with adjectives. Each student will then get a neighbor's description where they will have to draw the monster to an exact specification. The author will use the drawing to make revisions to their piece the next day and the drawing will happen a second time. Once all of the students have their monster descriptions written, they will write a narrative on how to catch the monster using vivid verbs. The students will have to have their pieces written and edited by Thursday. Everyone will take part in an author's share where they will present their piece to their friends. The best part is that they will have a drawing and a writing piece to hang up for all to see!

Students who get finished early will be allowed to make a 2 minute bat or spider craft to put on their opinion writing. Click below to see how easy it is.