Author's Purpose, Text Structure, and Practicing RACCE Responses in Reading Groups

We discussed this week how the author's purpose in writing an article reveals the text structure or organization of a piece. While analyzing informational texts, students have been asking "why" the author wrote the passage and finding a text structure that best supports that purpose. This week, we practiced responding to text structure questions in writing using the RACCE strategy (outlined below).

The RACCE strategy helps students organize their thoughts into a well-constructed paragraph and ensures that they answer all parts of a question. We discussed how the sentence starters given are simply a "jumping off" point and that students can add their own as they become more secure with the strategy. 

 Adam writes about how the author chose the cause and effect structure because they wanted to teach the reader about why tsunamis occur and the destruction that happens as a result.

 Nate describes how the author's purpose in writing the article is to show the similarities and differences between tsunamis and hurricanes. He explains that the author organized their ideas using compare and contrast structure to support this purpose.

Jake shares his RACCE response with the group.