I introduced my students to the concept of author's purpose last week. Their initial reaction was somewhat along the lines of, "You mean there's actually a reason people write this stuff?" I'm hoping that by the end of the year they'll grow to: "Yeah, leave it to a teacher to take a perfectly good writing selection and ruin it", or even, "Author's purpose, no sweat!" Since my students are all new to the country and their English proficiency level is very low, I decided to focus on only entertain, inform, and persuade for now. I've had a genre wall for a few years now. It consists of posters that name, define, and give examples of the various genres that students run across. As we read different books and short selections, we identify the genre, put the title on a small cut out (bulletin board shapes), and stick it to the appropriate poster. This wall has really helped my students become comfortable with identifying genres (not to mention the vocabulary--how many beginning level ESL students do you know that easily use the word genre?), and so I decided to do something similar with author's purpose. Since we are all familiar with the acronym PIE, I decided that a single graphic-organizer poster in the shape of a circle would be better than multiple posters. I enlisted some help from my favorite engineer to draw the circle and divide it into thirds (Did you know there is a formula for putting a triangle inside of a circle and that can then be used to divide the circle into thirds? Yeah, neither did I.) A little work with a marker and some letter stickers and voila, an author's purpose anchor chart is born! Of course the students needed to do some intensive practice to get things started, so we did a sort activity. I took short stories that I found on the internet (all free and yes, you can download them here) and created sort cards. After printing them on different colors of paper (easier to sort out and identify whose is whose when they get mixed up, dropped on the floor...), laminating, and cutting them, we were nearly ready to go. I then paired the students up, giving each pair a large white board (I made mine by purchasing white panel boards from Home Depot, asking them to cut them in quarters, and then duct taping the edges), and having them make and label three columns. The students then read the cards and placed them in the appropriate columns. Since they love anything that involves the "giant" white boards, they proclaimed the activity to be a lot of fun. Of course we also did some paper-and-pencil practice and, in typical fashion, they struggled the most with distinguishing persuasion from the other two, but I think they are starting to get the idea. I'm hoping the continued practice with the anchor chart will help to cement the concepts in the minds. It would be very nice if the next time I mention author's purpose they don't all say they've never heard of it! |
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI've been teaching since 2000 and love what I do! Archives
May 2018
Categories |