Seuss-errific Reading!

I found this fantastic hat template the other day at A Teacher's Treasure and couldn't wait to use it with my class! Of course, I changed it up a little to fit with the skill we've  been working on all week--Author's Purpose. See my Horton and Lorax posts for more on those lessons). They include pictures of anchor charts, student samples, and links to the documents I made to go with the lessons. 

In today's lesson, I wanted to lower the scaffold even more, so I read Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose to the class, then had the students create these awesome foldables. The task was to listen during the story and identify examples of when the author was informing, persuading, entertaining, and expressing ideas. They jotted down those examples on their 4-square papers from this lesson, then after the story, they wrote their items under each flap of the foldable. The top flap was where they were supposed to write what they thought the author's main message was. Here are a few of the examples from today:

This one says, "Don't be a free-loader!" was his main message. Love it!