Author's Purpose with Horton

After this really great Author's Purpose with The Lorax lesson yesterday, I decided to go a step further today using Horton Hears a Who! I think my kiddos are finally starting to understand that Author's Purpose is about more than those four words (persuade, inform, entertain, express).

In today's lesson I challenged them to listen and look for things the author included in the text and infer why he did that. Here's a copy of our anchor chart from the lesson:

What was so great is that even though I was modeling and sharing my thoughts as we went along, the kiddos made so many great inferences and thought of so many things that I'd never even considered! Here are a few of their papers:

 

Here's a copy of the chart I made for the kids to use if you're interested.

At the end of the lesson, I had the students use the back of the chart and follow the same procedure in whatever book they happened to be reading during Read to Self. Great formative assessment. I could really see who was able to apply the strategy and who needed more instruction.