Our current KGCS Comprehension Focus is Author's Purpose.  Student success with Author's Purpose is built on the understanding that a piece of text is created by an actual person for a reason.  This awareness can begin in the earliest grades by talking about the author's choices during picture book read-aloud lessons.  All students can parrot, "The author is the one who wrote the book," but they often lack the deeper understanding that authors have a clear objective that guides how they craft a text.  Developing a strong writing program in your classroom will also support the understanding that an author makes choices when creating text for a specific purpose.

An author's choices can be critiqued and evaluated using the framework of Question the Author.  Instead of simply asking students about the content of a piece of text, questions are framed with the author at the center of the analysis.  How does the author organize the information about sea turtles?  Why does the author include this piece of dialogue?  How does the author make the reader want to keep reading?  What does the author mean by that phrase?  How well did the author explain that?  What in the text makes you think that? The possibilities are endless, but it requires us to be ever-mindful of the ways we communicate and frame questions about text. You will know that you are changing thinking when students begin to use the word "author" in their discussions instead of just saying "It says... " when referring to the text.

The slides below review the rigor of Author's Purpose in the standards and assessments.