Aligning Text Structure with Author's Purpose

Looking back at my past six years teaching I have spent a lot of time taking my kiddos through different units that focus on informational and narrative writing. We wrote all about books, how-tos, narrative nonfiction, recipes, letters, fairy tales, and LOTS of small moment stories. But as my school begins implementing Lucy Calkin’s Units of Study in Writer’s Workshop along with the new expectations in the Core, I began reflecting and realized I have never explicitly taught opinion writing or asked my students to take a position on something and support that claim.

So to get my students thinking about this new text type, I decide to implement some close reading strategies to really look at how author’s structure their writing and what they tells us about this purpose. So here’s my first lesson on text structure as evidence for author’s purpose.

I began by telling my students that today we were going to be detectives, which naturally they totally bought into. I passed out their “close reading” hand lens and asked them to help me collect clues. I explained that we were looking for clues that would help us determine why the author wrote the text.  We reviewed the 3 purposes that we learned earlier in the year – Persuade, Inform, Entertain. But this time I explained that usually when the author’s purpose is to entertain, they are writing a narrative (narrate) and when they are persuading they are trying to get someone to believe their opinion.

We then looked a couple of books that we had just finished reading and talked about how the book was organized. In  Three Billy Goats Gruff we collected clues that lead us to see that it had a BME structure while the book Sharks had a table of contents and subtopics (or parts) that told about the big topic of sharks. We charted this information:

Then I asked students to think about the writing we have done so far this year – I asked them to study it closely and decide where it would go on our chart. They deduced that our small moments were narratives and our chapter books and all about books were informative. Now they were ready for the really gritty stuff!

I introduced a new text: I Wanna Iguana By:Karen Kaufman Orloff  and read the first letter that Alex wrote to his mom in the book. I asked students to turn and talk about why they think the boy was writing to his mom. What was his purpose? Was he trying to entertain her? inform her? or persuade her to do something? The very quickly where able to tell me he was persuading, so then we started to discussing how the text was organized. I asked them to find the sentence where the boy said what he wanted. We wrote that as our claim and continued reading charting all the reasons why he gave to support his opinion.

After reading the book we went back to our chart and added this new text structure as claim and reasons. I encouraged students to look for text structure when they are reading to determine the author’s purpose and to think about their purpose as writers and be sure that they structure their writing appropriately.