Teaching Author’s Purpose can sometimes be really tricky in primary grades  because it is not as easy as P.I.E. Teachers need a real game plan of how to teach Author’s purpose to the young students to give them a clear understanding of the skill. The sole purpose of this blog post is to guide teachers on how to teach author’s purpose without confusing the students and keeping it sweet and simple. So let’s start talking business!

First and foremost, the students need to learn what kind of content they might find in books in which the author’s purpose was to persuade, inform, or entertain. So, we started off by discussing what the author wants to give his readers when writing for these purposes. We started with Persuade and the students were given a variety of choices of what the author wants or might give in such a book. 

Then, we dove into choosing the correct content that might go in books keeping in mind what the author’s purpose was behind writing that book. We started off by covering PERSUADE. Students chose the content that might go in the book “Let’s Go For Fishing” where the author wants to convince the readers that fishing is a great activity and one should really try fishing. 

 The last step was for the students to write their own book with the specific purpose and come up with ideas of what they can add to that book. Students came up with really neat facts and reasons.

The other two purposes of Inform and Entertain were taught through the same process and it could not have been easier! The students had a clear understanding of the three different author’s purposes and were able to identify them during Read Alouds.

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