Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse is a popular children’s book that a lot of teachers love to read to their students. The book follows the character Lilly as she learns about forgiveness, apologies, and being considerate of others – all important lessons to teach to your students.
Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse tackles these themes in a child-friendly way and as a result, is a popular tool for teachers.
However, reading the book alone is not enough – you still need to plan lessons around this book to continue teaching your students about the themes while developing their skills.
Here are some great Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse lesson plans for you to take inspiration from and try out yourself!
Opinion Sharing
Once you and the class are finished reading the book, the obvious activity to do is to discuss the book and share opinions! Some students will like the book, others may not – so encourage them to form and share their own opinions!
As an activity, you can complete a worksheet where the students write what they did and didn’t like down in their books – perhaps throw in a drawing as a bonus activity too!
This is a great writing activity to practice your students’ handwriting, and a good way to recap the story with them during a different lesson!
Lilly Craft And Art Lesson Plan
Craft lessons are a super easy type of lesson to plan as all you need to do is gather the materials and let your kids go wild! As a result, making a craft lesson plan themed on Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse is super easy.
Give your students all the materials they need to cut out and put together their own versions of Lilly.
They can be truthful to her book appearance, and add all the important details of her appearance like her red boots and blue dress, or turn it into a fashion design activity where the students get to design new clothes for Lilly!
Once they are done, you can use the results of this activity to decorate your Lilly Purple Plastic Purse-themed display!
The Purple Purse Lesson Plan
Another great crafts activity to try out is making the iconic purple plastic purse itself! The purse plays an important role in the story (hence why it’s in the name of the book) and so, it’s a very relevant task to do with the class to boost their creativity.
Paper plates and ribbon can be used to make the body of the purse, and your students can use mixed media to add all the purple they desire – purple paint, purple felt, stickers, glitter, pom poms, and so much more.
Why not have a competition on who can design the best purple purse?
Learning Story Structure
This lesson plan will help your students better understand how stories work so they can start writing or telling their own stories.
Teach your students about how most stories are split into three parts -the beginning, middle, and end, and talk about what events in Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse fall into which section of the story.
You can even cut out story cards and have your students rearrange them to tell their own stories.
This will later help your students start their own creative writing projects.
These kinds of projects are great for encouraging their creative thinking, practicing their handwriting and sentence structure, spelling and grammar, and more. It all begins with a simple lesson plan on story structure!
Character Lesson Plan
The important message in Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse can be seen in the character development of Lilly herself.
To help your students really engage with the message of the story, analyze the character of Lilly with them and get them thinking critically about her actions and emotions throughout the book.
This can be a good group discussion lesson where you write down key notes and stick them up on the board.
Jumping from the previous story structure lesson plan, you and your students can explore what Lilly did in the three key parts of the story and how she felt – and most importantly, how she reacted to her feelings.
This is a great way to encourage your students to analyze their own emotions and actions! You can even encourage your students to pull evidence from the text to help them learn how to use textual evidence to support their points, a key skill to have as they grow older!
Final Thoughts
Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse is a great story to read with your students but simply reading the book is not enough.
Check out the list above for some great lesson plans and ideas centered around Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse for you to try out with your students!
Think about which ones will work best and good luck!
Hi, my name is Helena Waters and I was a teacher for 40 years before retiring last year.
During my time as a teacher I dedicated the majority of it to making classrooms as fun as possible, with educational parties, fun activities, and low cost entertainment that made the children excited about learning.
I taught children of all ages, from preschoolers to high school students. Now, with the pandemic having uprooted everything that children once knew about school and learning, I think that the need for my ideas is bigger than ever.
That is why I created School Sparks, a place in which I can write down and share all of my ideas on how to get students excited about going to school again. I hope that you’ll find some useful within a school setting, even at home too!
