Author's Purpose

My students were having a tough time understanding Author's Purpose. I decided I needed a hands-on way that my students could sort persuade, inform and entertain.

Let's be honest.... there's always old Scholastic Book Orders left over. So my students first sorted the mini-passages into the PIE categories.  Then they had a blast in cutting, sorting and gluing the clippings from the book orders.

I also do a STOP! GRAB YOUR BOOK! My students quickly grab their book and I have them tell me the Author's Purpose of their book. Using the sentence frame... The author's purpose of my book is to________. I know this because ( and they give a few reasons why!) This is a quick win-win as a teacher... I get to assess for speaking and listening standards, the other kids get good ideas of what book to read next and it is a perfect way to effectively use those 5 minutes before recess.

Makeover Madness: TPT facelift

I have a really bad confession... I normally work really hard on a TPT product and then just put together a "blah" cover. I have teamed up with some inspiring TPT/ bloggers to complete weekly TPT challenges.

Week One challenge consists of choosing one TPT product and giving it a facelift.  I designed these sentence starters because I realized it was something that was needed to help my third graders develop their academic discourse.

I really like how bold the new cover is.  I know when I am looking at TPT products, I like to see examples of the product on the cover.

Comment below about what you look at when buying a TPT product and I will choose a lucky winner!

Entering the realm of the TPT world...

Yesterday, marked my first uploaded TPT product.  I have been saying that I wanted to dive into the TPT world but I held back.  I felt very overwhelmed with the process, the copyright laws, the purchased fonts and clip art. I found two really great blogs, Ashely at the School Supply Addict and Erica at Erica's Ed Ventures, that really helped me out.  Their tutorials provided so much information that the process seemed less daunting. (Thank you, ladies!)