Today in the library, our 5th grader’s came in to follow up on their Author’s Purpose Lessons and work they had been doing in Writer’s Workshop this week.
The teachers and I collaborated to schedule this lesson at the end of the week to take a formative assessment on whether or not the students understood how to distinguish the three main types of author’s purpose in regards to mentor texts.
Click Here for the lesson plan that I used with the teachers. They classes each had 30 minutes in the library. I set up 5 stations with 3 books at every station. 1 book was to inform, 1 book was to persuade, and 1 book was to entertain at every station. Then, each station had 3 questions. The students independently moved through the stations and examined the books by looking at the title, cover, and flipping through the pages. The students did NOT read every book. The questions were printed out and placed in sheet protectors and in station holders for the students to read. They did NOT have their own copy of the questions. The questions were all modeled after STAAR stems.
As they moved through the stations they recorded their answers on a bubble answer sheet from Grade Cam. I used the same “class” from GradeCam for each class. The kids just used their number for class (1,2,3 etc) to identify them on the grade sheet.
After they completed the activity they came up to the document camera and scanned their answer sheet. If they missed any, GradeCam showed them what questions they missed and we allowed them to go back and correct their answers. We gave them the highest grade they earned.
The students really enjoyed this activity and there was high engagement! Below are the station documents I used for the station questions. You could easily replace the book titles with others they match the author’s purpose.
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