Our Reading Street Unit 1 test is coming up next week. I was looking for something that would spice up our day and be valuable to the students learning - the 2 most important aspects of teaching!
I decided to stick with the typical "P.I.E.E." to teach about persuading, informing, entertaining, AND expressing emotion (you can't forget that extra E!).
Whenever I incorporate an activity... I mean CRAFTIVITY.. into the classroom, my goal is to make it purposeful. I ask myself, "Is this craftivity going to take longer to teach or to make?" If the crafting takes longer, I feel like it is not beneficial to the education of the kids - no matter how cute it is! HOWEVER, I have found a lot of tricks to making a cute craft meaningful, you just have to sneak in the teachable moments whenever possible.
PIEE Author's Purpose document - click here!
Each student was given the pie outline and the cover sheet. In the center of the "frosting," we defined what Author's Purpose was - "Author's Purpose is the reason an author writes a text." Instead of just giving them the definition, I challenged them to think of it on their own (which many students already knew, whew!). If there was a struggle, my Plan B was to have them research it on their Chromebooks.
We made a list of our "key words" when it comes to author's purpose.
We went through the activity step-by-step. Each student had to write a couple sentences persuading me to do something. To inspire them, we watched this YouTube video and it brought back MANY memories from my childhood! :) They listened for the key words in each clip.
We have been studying hurricanes in science for the last 2 weeks. So, to tie in our science curriculum with our "inform" column, we wrote informational facts about hurricanes. The students used a search engine called KidRex. They found a great article on Weather Wiz Kids that listed amazing hurricane facts.
Entertain was one of my favorites to read as I walked around the room. I definitely have a classroom full of unique individuals!
To express emotions was slightly challenging for some students. I now know my goal for them is to dig deeper into their writing and pump up their sentences with descriptive words.
