Last week we discussed Author's Message as another strategy to think about text. We read together Thank You Mr. Falker with the focus of "What message does the author want us to take away?". Then began to create our Author's Message chart. Students worked in small groups with a single Polacco text to determine the author's message, then shared out as a group as we filled in our chart. Some books were harder to determine the message of than others. Two questions we used to help guide our thinking was "What lesson does the main character learn in the book?" and "How do the main character's thoughts an ideas change over the course of the book". The ideas in our chart are just some of the big ideas that came about in our discussion and are not inclusive of all possibilities. Students also added an author's message tab to their interactive notebook page with these sentence frames for using in their reading responses:
*I think the author wants us to learn...
*I think the message the author wants us to take away from the book is...
*I think what the author is saying about the world...
*I think one theme of this book is...
