Newspapers and Observations

Yesterday, we tool our notes about Author's Purpose and practiced finding the author's purpose using a picture book. Today we once again used a picture book, but we also used newspapers too to help us identify the 4 types of Author's Purposes. I purchased Jen Runde's Author's Purpose unit from her Teachers Pay Teachers store and that is where I have gotten several of my ideas from. It is a great unit! 

I have had newspapers stacking up in my room for several weeks now, and decided that they would be perfect to use for this lesson. What I did was I created 4 big anchor charts for each of the 4 purposes. I then split my students up into groups and gave them a newspaper, scissors, and glue. They had to find articles, advertisements, pictures, etc in their paper that was an example of each author's purpose. The kids loved it because they got to make a big mess that we cleaned up, and I loved it because I could tell that the kids actually got it! I did capture some pictures today of all of the fun, mess, and learning! 

I used the video that I shared earlier this week yesterday in class and we continued with the PIES theme today to help us remember the 4 types of Author's Purpose.

The charts we made in my 1st and 2nd period class. I also went ahead and put them up in the hallway because I was so proud of their work and thought it was such a neat activity.

The charts from 3rd and 4th period.

Some of the ones from 5th and 7th period.

The other 2 from 5th and 7th period.

After we finished, I had my students answer the sentence stem on their post-it note and then stick it to the big chart. I used a different color for each class. 

Did I mention that we made a little bit of a mess with this project? I am pretty sure we took at least 10 bags of trash out today!

Some of my Pre AP kids even decided to pick up a little couponing when we were finished. :)

Today we also had our Sheltered Instruction liaison on campus as well as another lady who is helping us this year since we failed to meet AYP this past school year because of our math scores. They both came in my room together at the same time and ended up staying in there for about 45 minutes. Normally they are in our rooms for maybe 10 minutes tops when they visit. Our AYP friend even came back to my room a 2nd time. I was not really sure if that was a good or bad thing. However, when I was headed out of the 6th grade building to go and check my box during my conference, they were both outside talking to my principal. They stopped me and told me how much they loved being in my room and loved the activity I was doing with my kids today. That made me feel really good and I was pretty excited about it. It put a smile on my face for sure! 

Yeah for it almost being Friday!