Adventures in Literacy Land: theme

Showing posts with label theme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theme. Show all posts

Theme with Text Cousins

Each year poses its own unique set of challenges, changes, and surprises.  This is one of the reasons I love teaching so much!  We get the opportunity to try again, change, and grow with each new year.
Last year I had the amazing opportunity to invite Tanny McGregor, author of Comprehension Connections, into my first grade classroom to model a lesson on theme. As we planned for this current year, my teammate and I were excited to add this lesson into our curriculum calendar.  And I wrote about what we planned to do for the Growing Readers and Writers Blog Hop. But...as we all know too well...planning and actually teaching are two very different things.

One great way to use mentor texts is for comparison. Check out this post to see how "text cousins" can demonstrate theme.

Our goal was to teach our first graders how to uncover the theme across several texts.  We have devoted a lot of time this year to deep thinking, so we hoped that this would build off what they could already do.  We would use three texts each day throughout the week.  This would provide them with multiple opportunities for practice with theme or author's message.

We started off the week with the introduction of the word theme and a discussion about all the other words that can sometimes be used for the same concept: author's message, central message, main point, main idea, author's point, etc.  Then we dug right into what our students already knew.  And what they discovered is that they have been studying theme all year.

Throughout the year we read all the Otis books, Tacky books, and Tippy-Toe Chick Go.  So this is where we started: with texts that have already been read, examined, and discussed.  This proved to be a great decision because our time was not spent on the reading of the texts but on the bridging of three texts and their themes that had been previously discussed throughout the year.  We brought these three texts out again and asked our students to brainstorm what connections or possible themes that these three books have in common.

One great way to use mentor texts is for comparison. Check out this post to see how "text cousins" can demonstrate theme.

Wow!  We wrote down all their ideas.  This was one tip that Tanny was sure to model for us.  There does not have to be one correct theme but possible theme ideas.  And she was right!  They came up with some great ideas.

One great way to use mentor texts is for comparison. Check out this post to see how "text cousins" can demonstrate theme.

And so our lesson continued each day with three different texts: a poem, pictures from a story, and a book.

They used those three different texts to come up with possible common themes.

WOW!  What we found was that the lesson proved to have the right amount of challenge for them. At times they wanted to revert back to surface level.

For example, we used the texts This Way, Ruby, a poem The Secret Song, and Sidewalk Flowers.  One of our classes wanted to point out that there was a bird in all three texts or that there were flowers in all three.  These were connections that but they were not digging deeper into the theme or message of the text.

At the end of the week, my teammate took one of the themes for each set of text cousins and had it framed.  She explained that the theme or message is so important and special that it needs to be framed.  I LOVE this idea because it is another visual for our first graders to understand the importance of deep thinking when reading.

One great way to use mentor texts is for comparison. Check out this post to see how "text cousins" can demonstrate theme.One great way to use mentor texts is for comparison. Check out this post to see how "text cousins" can demonstrate theme.


I look forward to using these lesson again next year and seeing where it takes us.  What texts would you use to do this teach theme?





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