Author purpose and evidence in informational texts is the focus of this Grade 8 ELA resource designed to help students examine how writers communicate ideas through purpose, evidence, and paragraph organization. Using a recycling-focused informational passage, students analyze how writing choices guide readers toward a central message.

What Students Practise

• Identify whether an author’s purpose is to inform, persuade, or compare.
• Recognize how definitions, examples, and statistics support claims.
• Analyze how paragraphs move from a problem to evidence and finally to a decision.
• Use textual evidence to explain why specific details are included.
• Examine how writing choices and organization reveal an author’s intent.

Activities Included

Students work through a reading passage about recycling, followed by multiple-choice questions, true-or-false statements, short-answer questions, a matching activity, and a cloze exercise. An extended-response task asks students to explain how the author’s purpose is revealed through evidence and structure. A Did You Know section provides an additional learning moment.

How to Use This Resource

Use this informational text worksheet during a reading and literature studies lesson, as guided practice, independent classwork, homework, or a review activity. The questions encourage students to identify evidence types, interpret paragraph structure, and support their explanations with details from the passage.

What’s Included

• Student worksheet activities focused on author purpose and evidence
• Student Notes & Lesson Summary supplement
• Separate Teacher Guide PDF with Learning Objectives, Teaching Tips, Discussion Questions, and Common Mistakes

With its focused passage and varied response formats, this resource gives Grade 8 learners structured practice in analyzing informational texts and explaining how evidence and organization contribute to an author’s message within an Ontario ELA context.