Fun Times with Author's Purpose and Inferences

With state testing taking up most of the students' days these past two weeks, I haven't been able to blog about our happenings since not much was happening.

Testing is done so we are off and running now!

While on Pinterest, I saw all kinds of PIE ideas for author's purpose.  I decided to use Erin's from I'm Lovin' Lit and tweaked it with one idea from Pinterest.  I like using foldables and found hers easy to use.  It's one lesson in her Interactive Reading Informational Text Notebooks.  I used the one with the three pockets, but on the pocket I put the definitions and example of the kinds of texts.  Using the blank squares she provided, students looked through Scholastic book club flyers for books that were either persuading, informing, or entertaining.  Students put two books per a square and put them into the correct pockets.  While searching, students had to make inferences about the author's purpose based on the book title, cover, and small blurb.

Final Product

I used the author's purpose lesson as a springboard into our inferences lesson.  Since they will be doing plenty of inferencing on text they read in the future, I wanted the refresher to be entertaining.  What better way to entertain middle school students, especially during state testing, than to use short, animated videos? There are none! I found a few videos myself on Pinterest, but it was few and far between.  I am extremely grateful that I follow and read Jaime's blog over at Technology Up to Speed!  She posted about movie shorts and reading strategies with links to all the movie clips on YouTube and handouts to use.  I used Keepvid to download the videos in case they should disappear and want to use them again.  I used her handout idea, but I added guiding questions to help students know the parts where they should be making an inference.

Visit again to read all about the Pumas' Parent - Teacher Party during parent conferences and how it was received by the parents.  You won't want to miss finding out about Curt's Crazy Cafe - where creating great writing is fun (and tasty).

If you haven't read about my amazing professional development presentations about Teach Like a Pirate, do so now! It will be worth your time if you want ideas on how to TLAP your presentations. You can catch up on it since we're on hiatus this week due to the conferences.