Author's Purpose

Sorry I have been a little M.I.A. lately! I miss my blogging world, and all my blogging friends! I guess you could say I have been a little bit of a rut lately in the creativity department.  Changing grade levels was more of a challenge than I ever dreamed, but I'm finally getting my groove back:) This week we have been working Author's Purpose! Since I've been swimming in my "rut," I've taken a lot of my ideas from Amy Lemons at Step into Second Grade. Seriously...could this girl be any more creative??!! I'm so grateful for her blog this year while I'm on this new journey into second grade. She just has so many great ideas and units that I'm soaking up as a new second grade teacher. So here is a little look into what's been going on:

We started the week with writing to entertain. I read Where the Wild Things Are, and the kids wrote on this CUTE paper why they thought the story was entertaining.

You can get this activity for free at Amy's blog HERE!

In the same file you find on her blog, Amy uses the book I Wanna Iguana to introduce writing to persuade. There is a great test and activity you can use with that book. I, however, do not have that book, but I do have I Wanna New Room. SO I just adapted.

This is a great book to use because the little boy is actually writing letters to his parents trying to persuade them to get him a new room. It's also pretty hilarious and my kids laughed all the way through. When we finished with this, I gave my students a quiz I created for comprehension:

Then they did Amy's activity where they try to persuade their parents to get/give them something. Here is a picture of her example. You can get this on the link above to her blog.

I kept telling them over and over again they had to tell their parents WHY they thought they deserved what they wanted. They came up with some really great and creative ideas! 

Finally, we wrote to inform. I began by reading them an informational book on spiders. It was a great thing to do because spiders are a high interest level for kiddos for some reason. I think you could have heard a pin drop while I was reading:) We talked about spiders for a bit, and all the information we learned from the book. I had them fill out a short paper to write down their thoughts, and then they made these spiders with their information:

This is the example I showed them to get them started. 

As they finished up their projects, I slowly added them to our door:

I just need to add their writing to inform spiders at the bottom, and we are all set! 

On Monday, I'm going to review what we learned this week by asking them to look at a character picture and write a story to entertain, persuade, or inform. Here is the example we will do together:

We will decide if we want to write an entertaining story about a firefighter, an informational piece, or persuade someone why firefighters are the best/persuade mom and dad to be a firefighter when they grow up. (I hope that makes sense!)

Everything I created this week for Author's Purpose, you can get HERE for FREE!

I hope everyone has had a fabulous fall so far! It's crazy how time is flying:) I hope everyone has a great weekend!