The multi-lesson, 47-page packet contains everything you need to ensure kids can recognize the clues provided to identify the type of text, the intended audience, and the author's purpose in writing the passage.

What is the author's purpose in writing a joke book? What about a book about the digestive system? Explore author's purpose with a worksheet that challenges kids to identify whether ten books are meant to entertain, inform, or persuade.

Challenge your class to find the three purposes for writing. After they read three short passages, kids note whether the author's purpose was to inform, persuade, or entertain.

After reading The Mitten by Jan Brett, scholars discuss the author's purpose. Small groups compare and contrast a book written to entertain and a book to inform, then create a T-Chart detailing the characteristics of...

Explore author's purpose with an activity about persuasive arguments. After reading a short passage about Spain, learners identify three main passages that the author uses to persuade the reader.

President Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech, delivered on June 12, 1987 before the Berlin Wall, provides class members with an opportunity to examine three key aspects of informational text: author bias, the use of facts and...

Put young grammarians to the test with an activity about adverbs. A five-paragraph passage prompts kids to find the adverbs and circle them, noting their purpose in context.

Break an article down with a SOAPSTone chart. Class members determine the speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone. The chart includes a question for each of these elements, provides some clarifying text for each, and...

I came, I saw, I conquered! Parallel structure, employed by writers even before Julius Caesar, is the focus of a lesson that teaches young writers the power of this rhetorical device. Class members analyze speeches by Dr. Martin Luther...

To get to the heart of a writer's purpose, remember to have some PIE (Persuade, Inform, or Entertain)! And, appropriately, here is a PIE chart that leaves room for pupils to identify each letter of the acronym and any other ideas or...

The AP Literature and Composition exam is all about close reading. Test takers are presented with a passage and asked to analyze how an author uses literary devices to create a desired effect. Prepare your students for the exam with a...

Words carry baggage. In addition to their literal, denotative meaning, words also carry the weight of the associations and connotations attached to the word—the connotations of words writers use to create the tone of a piece. An...

The key idea in this interactive exercise designed for high schoolers is that figurative language, especially similes, and metaphors, add layers of meaning to a text. Users examine examples from speeches, ads, movie dialogue, and poems,...

With the end of the year quickly approaching it's time to find out exactly how much your sixth graders have learned. Specifically designed for the Common Core ELA standards, this practice test gives students five reading passages,...

Middle schoolers aren't too young to feel strongly about politics, social issues, consumer rights, or environmental problems. Demonstrate the first steps toward social change with a project about action-oriented writing. Eighth...

Get your class going on one of the final assessments for a unit on short stories by introducing iMovie and its main features. In this tenth instructional activity in a series of fourteen, pupils take some time to explore iMovie before...

Middle schoolers develop a strategy as they read excerpts from Walk Two Moons. Using question and answer relationship strategies class members bolster their reading comprehension as they appropriately identify and create...

Teach your class about saving, spending, and goal setting with a story about a couple of bunnies who went shopping and related activities. Learners keep track of the bunnies' spending, practice identifying long- and short-term savings...

Letter by letter, sound by sound, monitor the growth of your emergent readers with these assessment templates. Adaptable to the needs of individual students, these one-on-one assessments focus on children's ability to identify...

What other inventions was Thomas Edison responsible for besides the telegraph and lightbulb? Incorporate a set of worksheets into your study of Edison and other inventors. The 48-page packet includes all types of activities from word...

Happy teens are healthy teens! Pupils embark on a self-reflective journey using a series of assessments and discussions to promote personal development. The lessons focus on identifying low and high self-esteem attitudes and behaviors,...

Invite your learners to research three different websites that pertain to a topic focused on in your syllabus. Learners fill out a chart by answering questions about each site. Then, they compare how useful the sites are to one...

Examine different types of questions while studying Peter and the Starcatchers. After learning about the different types of questions, pupils read passages from the text, answer the questions, and label each question with its...

Here learners get to flex some serious algebraic muscles through an investigation of logistic growth. The properties of the constant terms in the logistic growth formula are unraveled in a short but content-dense...