Lilly Purple Plastic Purse

This post will give you some insight as to how we progress through a Literacy learning goal. It will also show you why it's important to be at school every day as you will see that the lesson actually extends over several days. Don't forget to ask your child about reading this book. Perhaps you can both share a time when you felt just like Lilly afterwards.

We always aim to start with a learning goal that comes from the Ontario Curriculum Guidelines. For this particular lesson our goal was: to use stated and implied information and ideas in texts to make simple inferences and reasonable predictions about Lilly (our main character).

Our first step was to have a read aloud. Everyone enjoyed listening to Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse.

Next, as a large group we discussed what type of words we could use to describe Lilly as the main character. We recorded them on an anchor chart.

The next day, we read the text for a second time, and then looked at the words that we used to describe Lilly. From that large list we focused on a few key words and we started to hunt for evidence through the text. Here is an example of one of the words we chose to describe Lilly.

A few days later, We re-visited the story for a third time and then it was time for the small group work to start. Each group of 3-4 students were given 2 words that had been used to describe Lilly in previous conversations. We created an anchor chart which modelled the expectation. Together they had to read through the story and find evidence to support the words at the top of each sheet.

Our final activity was an independent task. Each student had to answer the following question:
Q: Choose a word to describe Lilly. Use evidence from the book "Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse" to support your thinking.  Below are some responses that I collected.