What do Malala Yousafzai, Al Gore, and Michelle Obama all have in common? They are all nonfiction authors with a purpose. In this interactive lesson, students will gain practice looking at details in text to identify the author’s purpose.
Students will be able to explain the idea of an author’s purpose and analyze texts to determine whether they write to persuade, inform, or entertain the reader.
The adjustment to the whole group lesson is a modification to differentiate for children who are English learners.
EL adjustments
Introduction
(5 minutes)
Tell students that today we are going to talk about authors and think about the author's purpose, which is the reason an author writes.
Ask students to brainstorm a list of things that authors create (e.g., newspaper articles, novels, comics, recipes, etc.). Write students' ideas on the chart paper.
Discuss with students why authors write these different pieces.
Support students to understand that authors write with a purpose to persuade, inform, or entertain the reader.
Beginning
Provide and post the definition of the following words, along with an image if applicable, in L1 and English, for students to refer to throughout the lesson: "author," "purpose," "entertain," "persuade," "inform."
Give ELs time to come up with different types of texts initially with a partner who speaks the same language or with a helpful non-EL before contributing to the larger class discussion.
Intermediate
Provide images of different types of text (recipe, newspaper article, advertisement, picture book) to give ELs a more concrete understanding.
For the class discussion, encourage ELs to use sentence frames such as: "The author's purpose of writing a ____________ (type of text) is to ____________ (reason)."