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English lesson plan · 4th grade (Year 5 in England) · 45 minutes

Author's purpose

Reading Comprehension

CCSS RI.4.8CCSS RI.6.6England: Y5/6 ReadingEngland: KS2 SATs Reading

Objective and success criteria

Students will: Author's purpose.

  • I can answer questions on today's skill on my own, without help.
  • I can explain each step and say why it works.
  • I can check my answer and spot a mistake.

Before and after

Needs first: Main idea and supporting details

Leads to: Rhetoric and persuasive techniques; Why did the author include this detail?

Materials: A short text or extract (one copy each), Highlighters, Question cards, Mini whiteboards, A short model text on the board, Printed student sheet (below).

Warm-up · 5 min

  • Quick retrieval from earlier learning (Main idea and supporting details). Students answer on mini whiteboards.
  • Show answers together and note who needs support in the main task.
  1. Exercise is good for your body and your mind. It makes your heart and muscles stronger. It can also help you sleep better and feel happier. What is the main idea? (Sleep is important. / Muscles are strong. / Running is fun. / Exercise has many benefits.) → Exercise has many benefits.Prompt: What is the WHOLE text mostly about, not just one part?
  2. Sloths move very slowly. They hang upside down in trees for most of the day. They even sleep and eat upside down. Moving slowly helps them save energy. What is the main idea? (Trees are tall. / Sloths eat leaves. / Sloths live slow, upside-down lives in trees. / Sloths sleep a lot.) → Sloths live slow, upside-down lives in trees.Prompt: What is the WHOLE text mostly about, not just one part?
  3. Dolphins are very smart. They can learn tricks, solve puzzles and recognise themselves in a mirror. They also talk to each other with clicks and whistles. What is the main idea? (Dolphins are intelligent animals. / Dolphins whistle. / Dolphins like mirrors. / Dolphins live in the sea.) → Dolphins are intelligent animals.Prompt: What is the WHOLE text mostly about, not just one part?

Hook · 5 min

  • Read the first lines of a short text aloud and ask what students predict will happen and why.
  • Share the objective: Author's purpose. Read the success criteria together.

I do: model it · 10 min

  • Work through the example out loud, saying why you do each step, not just what you do.
  • Example: Every pupil should learn to swim. Swimming keeps you fit, it is fun, and it could one day save your life. What is the author's main purpose?
  • Step 1: The writer's choices show their purpose.
  • Step 2: So the answer is: to persuade
  • Answer: to persuade
  • Pause after each step and ask a student to say what comes next.

We do: guided practice · 10 min

  • Do these together. Students try each step on whiteboards before you reveal it.
  • Use the hints as prompts rather than giving the answer.
  1. Every pupil should learn to swim. Swimming keeps you fit, it is fun, and it could one day save your life. What is the author's main purpose? (to entertain / to describe a pool / to persuade / to explain how to swim) → to persuadePrompt: Is the writer mainly trying to inform, persuade, entertain or explain?
  2. Once upon a time, a dragon was afraid of the dark. Every night he slept with a candle lit, which was a problem, because he kept sneezing it out. What is the author's main purpose? (to persuade / to inform / to entertain / to give instructions) → to entertainPrompt: Is the writer mainly trying to inform, persuade, entertain or explain?

You do: independent practice · 10 min

  • Students work on the student sheet. Circulate and check the first two answers of every student early.
  • Students who finish: write a question of their own for a partner, with the answer.

The 8 questions are on the student sheet below, with answers in the key.

Exit ticket · 5 min

  • Two questions on their own. Sort answers into got it / nearly / not yet to plan the next lesson.
  1. Come to Sunny Farm this Saturday! Meet the baby goats, ride a pony and taste our famous apple pie. Tickets only $5! What is the author's main purpose? (to explain how goats grow / to describe the weather / to persuade people to visit the farm / to tell a funny story) → to persuade people to visit the farmPrompt: Is the writer mainly trying to inform, persuade, entertain or explain?

Watch out for

  • Answering from memory or opinion instead of evidence in the text.
  • Copying a long quote without explaining what it shows.

Support and stretch

Support

  • Review first: Main idea and supporting details.
  • Use concrete materials: a short text or extract (one copy each).
  • Give the first step of each question, or a partly worked example to finish.
  • Pair with a confident partner for the guided practice.

Stretch

  • Move on to: Rhetoric and persuasive techniques; Why did the author include this detail?.
  • Explain a common mistake in writing and how to fix it.
  • Write a word problem that uses today's skill, then solve a partner's.

Homework and more practice

Free online practice with hints and printable worksheets for this skill: eurekami.com/english/grade-4.

Free lesson plan from eurekami.com/lesson-plan-builder

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Author's purpose

Name

Date

Score/ 8

  1. Question 1

    Come to Sunny Farm this Saturday! Meet the baby goats, ride a pony and taste our famous apple pie. Tickets only $5! What is the author's main purpose?

    • A. to tell a funny story
    • B. to persuade people to visit the farm
    • C. to explain how goats grow
    • D. to describe the weather

A Letter to the Council

Dear Councillors, I am writing to ask you not to close Elm Street Library. I am nine years old, and the library is one of the most important places in our town. First, the library helps children learn. Every Saturday, there is a story club where younger children listen to stories and older children like me read aloud. Many families cannot afford to buy lots of books, but at the library everyone can borrow them for free. Second, the library is not just for children. My neighbour, Mr Haddad, goes there every week to use the computers because he does not have one at home. He uses them to apply for jobs and to talk to his grandchildren in another country. Some people say that everything is online now, so we do not need libraries. However, not everyone has the internet at home, and a website cannot give you a quiet, warm place to study or a librarian who helps you find exactly the right book. Please keep our library open. It belongs to all of us. Yours faithfully, Priya Shah

  1. Question 2

    Read "A Letter to the Council". What is Priya's main purpose in writing this letter?

    • A. to describe her favourite book
    • B. to complain about Mr Haddad
    • C. to explain how to use computers
    • D. to persuade the council to keep the library open

The Four-Day Week: Promise and Pitfalls

In recent years, a growing number of companies have experimented with a four-day working week, in which employees work about 80 per cent of their usual hours for 100 per cent of their pay, on the condition that they maintain their output. Supporters argue that the model could transform working life. Critics warn that its benefits may be exaggerated. The most widely reported trials have produced striking results. In one large study involving several dozen organisations, most companies chose to continue the four-day week after the trial ended. Employees reported less stress, better sleep and fewer days off sick, while company revenue remained broadly stable. For businesses struggling to recruit, the promise of an extra day off can be a powerful attraction. Yet these findings come with important caveats. Companies that volunteer for such trials may already be enthusiastic about flexible working and well suited to it. Their success may not be representative of all workplaces. Moreover, many of the participating organisations were offices or creative businesses, where output is relatively easy to reorganise. In hospitals, schools or factories, where staff must be present to deliver a service, reducing hours without hiring more people may simply be impossible. There are also questions about what happens in the long term. Early enthusiasm can fade, and the pressure to fit five days of work into four may eventually lead to longer, more intense working days, cancelling out the benefits to wellbeing. None of this means the idea should be dismissed. It does suggest that the four-day week is less a universal solution than a tool that may suit some sectors far better than others. The challenge for policymakers is to learn from the trials without assuming that what worked for a marketing agency will work for an emergency ward.

  1. Question 3

    Read "The Four-Day Week: Promise and Pitfalls". What is the purpose of the reference to "an emergency ward" in the final sentence?

    • A. to show that marketing agencies are dangerous
    • B. to give a vivid example of a workplace where the model may not work
    • C. to argue that hospitals are badly run
    • D. to describe the writer's job

Should Primary Schools Ban Homework?

Every evening, in homes across the country, the same battle takes place: tired children, frustrated parents and a worksheet that nobody wants to finish. It is time for primary schools to ban homework. The most important reason is that, for young children, the evidence for homework is weak. Several large reviews of research have found that homework has little measurable effect on the test results of pupils under eleven. Older students may benefit, but for younger children, the hours spent on worksheets do not seem to pay off. Second, children need time to play, rest and be with their families. Play is not a waste of time; it builds creativity, problem-solving and friendships. A child who has spent six hours concentrating at school deserves an evening to explore, read for pleasure or simply be bored – which is when imagination often kicks in. Some people argue that homework teaches responsibility. This is a fair point. However, children can learn responsibility in many other ways: feeding a pet, helping to cook dinner or practising an instrument they have chosen themselves. Finally, homework can be unfair. Some children have parents who can help them every night and a quiet desk to work at. Others share a small space with siblings or have parents who work late. Homework can widen the gap between these children instead of closing it. Schools should replace homework with something simple: read every day, for fun. That is one habit worth taking home.

  1. Question 4

    Read "Should Primary Schools Ban Homework?". Why does the writer open with a description of an evening 'battle'?

    • A. to describe a real war
    • B. to argue that parents are lazy
    • C. to give statistical evidence
    • D. to grab attention with a situation readers recognise

The Shark on the Motorway

During a storm last spring, a photo exploded across social media. It showed a large shark swimming beside cars on a flooded motorway. Within hours it had been shared more than 80,000 times, often with captions such as "Stay indoors — sharks in the streets!" Fourteen-year-old Amira Haddad saw the photo in her family group chat. Something felt wrong. "The shark looked too sharp compared with the blurry water," she said. "So I decided to check." First, Amira ran a reverse image search. She found the same shark in a wildlife photo published years earlier, on a website about ocean animals. Next, she checked two local news sites. Neither mentioned sharks; both reported flooding and road closures. Finally, she found an article from a fact-checking organisation explaining that the image had been edited and had appeared during several different storms in different countries. Amira posted the fact-check in the group chat. "My uncle had already shared the photo," she laughed. "He was embarrassed, but he thanked me." Fact-checkers say edited images spread fastest when they are shocking and arrive during real emergencies, when people are anxious and want to warn others. Their advice is simple: pause before you share, look for the original source, and check whether reliable outlets are reporting the same thing.

  1. Question 5

    Read "The Shark on the Motorway". What is the writer's main purpose in the final paragraph?

    • A. to describe sharks
    • B. to give readers practical advice for checking images
    • C. to criticise Amira's uncle
    • D. to make readers afraid of storms

The Clever Octopus

If you wanted to design an intelligent animal from scratch, you probably would not start with a creature that has no bones, three hearts and blue blood. Yet the octopus is one of the most remarkable problem-solvers in the animal kingdom. In laboratories, octopuses have learned to unscrew jar lids to reach crabs inside. Some have escaped from their tanks at night, crept across the floor to a neighbouring tank to eat the fish, and then returned home before morning. In the wild, veined octopuses have been filmed collecting coconut shells, carrying them across the seabed and assembling them into a portable shelter – one of the few known examples of tool use by an invertebrate. What makes this intelligence so surprising is how different the octopus brain is from ours. About two-thirds of its roughly 500 million nerve cells are not in its head at all but in its eight arms. Each arm can taste, touch and even make simple decisions on its own. Scientists are still debating what it might feel like to be an animal whose thinking is spread throughout its body. The octopus's cleverness may be linked to its lifestyle. Without a shell for protection, it must outwit predators by hiding, changing colour in a fraction of a second, or squeezing through gaps no bigger than its beak. Survival depends on flexible thinking. Strangely, most octopuses live only one or two years. They have no parents to teach them and usually die soon after laying eggs. Every skill they show, they must largely work out for themselves.

  1. Question 6

    Read "The Clever Octopus". Why does the writer open by describing the octopus's bones, hearts and blood?

    • A. to show how unexpected its intelligence is
    • B. to explain how octopuses breathe
    • C. to argue that octopuses are dangerous
    • D. to compare octopuses with fish

The Long Wall

The Great Wall of China is not one wall at all. It is a network of walls, trenches and watchtowers built and rebuilt over more than two thousand years by different dynasties. If all its sections were laid end to end, they would stretch over 21,000 kilometres – more than half the distance around the Earth. The earliest walls were built from packed earth around the seventh century BCE, when rival Chinese states defended their borders from one another. In about 220 BCE, the first emperor of a united China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered many of these separate walls to be joined together to protect the north from raiding groups. The sections that most visitors see today are far younger. They were built during the Ming dynasty, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ming builders used bricks and stone, which is why these sections have survived so well. Watchtowers were placed close enough together for soldiers to send signals using smoke by day and fire by night. The wall came at a terrible cost. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, prisoners and farmers were forced to work on it, often in freezing mountains or burning deserts. Many died, and stories and songs about their suffering are still told. Did the wall work? Historians disagree. It slowed down small raids and helped control trade and travel, but determined armies could still break through or simply go around it. Today, its greatest power may be as a symbol – of human effort, of history and of a nation's identity.

  1. Question 7

    Read "The Long Wall". Why does the writer include paragraph 4?

    • A. to show the human cost of building the wall
    • B. to argue that the wall should be knocked down
    • C. to explain how bricks are made
    • D. to describe the wall's shape

The Vault at the Top of the World

On a frozen island in the Arctic Ocean, between Norway and the North Pole, a narrow concrete doorway sticks out of the side of a mountain. Behind it, a tunnel leads deep into the rock. This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and it holds more than a million packets of seeds from almost every country on Earth. Why keep seeds in a mountain? Farmers all over the world depend on many different varieties of crops, such as types of rice that survive floods or kinds of wheat that resist disease. If a variety disappears because of war, natural disaster or simple accident, it may be lost for ever. The vault is a back-up copy, like saving a precious file in two places. The location was chosen with care. The vault is high enough above sea level to stay dry even if ice caps melt. Inside, the seeds are kept at about minus 18 degrees Celsius, cold enough to keep many of them alive for decades or even centuries. The surrounding rock is permanently frozen, so even if the power failed, the seeds would stay cold. The vault opened in 2008. In 2015, it was used for the first time: scientists who had lost access to their own seed bank during a war in Syria withdrew samples, grew new plants and later sent fresh seeds back to the vault. The back-up had worked. No one hopes the vault will be needed often. But like a fire extinguisher in a school corridor, it is reassuring to know it is there.

  1. Question 8

    Read "The Vault at the Top of the World". What is the author's main purpose?

    • A. to inform readers about the seed vault and why it matters
    • B. to tell a funny story
    • C. to persuade readers to become farmers
    • D. to give instructions for planting seeds

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Answer key: Author's purpose

  1. 1. B. to persuade people to visit the farm

  2. 2. D. to persuade the council to keep the library open

  3. 3. B. to give a vivid example of a workplace where the model may not work

  4. 4. D. to grab attention with a situation readers recognise

  5. 5. B. to give readers practical advice for checking images

  6. 6. A. to show how unexpected its intelligence is

  7. 7. A. to show the human cost of building the wall

  8. 8. A. to inform readers about the seed vault and why it matters