The Value of Knowing Your Audience
Slow and steady wins the race, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, cheaters never prosper—we could go on and on with all of the great lessons we’ve taken away from moral stories. We’d be willing to bet you could recall more than a few yourself if we asked. But why is that? Because moral stories and fables know their audience—children. Knowing the audience is important, and it’s a skill we’d like to help you teach your students. And what better way to do that than with fables? You can find our morals-packed, free lesson plan here.
About the Lesson Plan
The objective of this lesson plan is to identify the intended audience in fables. Students will also learn to understand how root words and relationship words help an audience make sense of unfamiliar words, phrases or structures.
This lesson plan uses fable as a model to help students understand audience. Begin with a brief discussion of fable. Do your students know what it is? Can they think of any words that sound like it, and do those words have a connection to it? Follow up with a description of fables and how they often include animals and a message or moral. Next, spend some time discussing how best to deliver a message with your students. Do people always like being told what to do? Or is it better to show them the value of their actions? Ask your students if they’d use the same words and methods when talking to an adult versus another student. Then, talk about how we as readers know when a moral is coming. Talk about how the author uses transitional language to signal the relationship of events.
Using the animal list we’ve provided, ask student volunteers to draw slips from a bag. Once two animals are drawn, ask students how each animal would fare in a competition against the other. What would the two have to learn from each other based on their size? For example, what could a small animal teach a larger animal about the value of being gentle or kind? Have students draw pairs until they better understand how fables work. Then, split students into six or fewer groups and assign each group a fable. Students will task groups to read the fable, find the message and note which audience it is meant for, and locate any transition words used to make sure the audience doesn’t miss the message. Finally, individually or in their groups, students will use Read Ahead AI to mark as emphasis words any transitions word used in the fable and the moral. Students will save their work as a presentation in Read Ahead AI and submit to their teacher.
Why Use Read Ahead AI
All of our free lesson plans leverage the power of Read Ahead AI to help students become better readers. By showing readers key words and phrases before asking them to read, we can boost their overall comprehension. Furthermore, Read Ahead AI lets students choose which words they think are important. In this way, student voices quite literally become part of the curriculum. Time spent reading in Read Ahead is automatically logged as well.
If you haven’t already, you can sign up for a Read Ahead AI account here. You’ll need one to access the presentations we’ve made in this lesson plan. If you’re brand new to Read Ahead and would like a demo, we’d be happy to meet with you! You can sign up for one here.
Happy teaching!