Ep70: Teaching Theme : this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hey, hey, welcome to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, this is Rachael, your host. I'm so glad that you are joining me today. I have a great episode planned for you today. We are going to do a little mini workshop style here on the podcast. I'm going to teach you a really clear and specific way that you can teach theme to your students. If you are like me, I was teaching theme wrong for a really long time before I came across this strategy. The ideas that I'm sharing with you today are not my own. Unfortunately, I don't remember where I learned about this but when I came across this strategy, it was like a light bulb went off in my head. I was like, oh my gosh, how have I not been teaching theme like this? If you feel like when you teach theme to your students, you get that deer in headlights look from your students, you are not alone. I was there 100%. When I found this really cool strategy that I'm going to share with you today, it was like not only did the light bulb go off for me when I was learning how to teach it to the students but when the students started using this strategy, it was like light bulbs went off for them. I'm really excited to share this with you because I know a lot of teachers struggle when it comes to teaching theme. I won't make you wait any longer. Let's go ahead and dive right into one of the best ways that I have found to teach theme in literature to your students.
Let's first think about why it's so hard to teach theme. Teachers struggle to teach theme and if we're being honest, we often spoon feed our students the theme when we're trying to get them to identify in the books that we read. We'll ask questions like 'What was the problem of the story?', 'What did the character learn?'. These are all great prompting questions but it is a huge leap to expect our students to answer those prompting questions and then be able to discover what the theme is. We need to create a little bit of a bridge between those prompting questions to how they actually find the theme. That's what the strategy I'm going to teach you today will do. So that's the first thing we struggle with, we spoon feed our students. We try to spoon feed our students by asking them these prompting questions like, 'what was the problem, what did the character learn?' and then we ask them to take that huge leap into discovering the theme.
Speaker1:
They also struggle because finding theme is an abstract concept. It's not something that they can go right into the text and say, 'The author says the theme is _____', right? They have to piece it together. We've been talking here on the podcast over the last few months, really all the way back into the fall about reading comprehension strategies. When you're asking students to find theme, you're asking them to really rely on those comprehension strategies, things like inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing those really hard comprehension strategies that students often struggle with. They're having to use those strategies to then identify what the theme is. We are really pulling on a lot of abstract thinking here to get our students to discover theme so we really have to take a holistic approach when it comes to teaching theme. We can't teach it in a vacuum. We have to first teach our students these comprehension skills and strategies, then have them use those to apply them to finding theme.
One of the things that students struggle with is that they often confuse theme with the main idea. One of the things that I like to do right off the bat when I'm teaching theme to my students is to tell them the difference between theme and main idea. I say that the theme is that central message that the author wants the reader to understand and that themes often come from the author's own beliefs or feelings. Then I write on an anchor chart. I'll say theme is not the same as main idea and I list the things that theme is and I list the things that the main idea is. I'll make a simple T chart and under 'theme' I'll write a lesson the author wants us to learn. I'll say a moral that the author is trying to show us. I'll also indicate that a theme can be representing the author's own beliefs, and this is a really important part of the theme, it can be applied to our own lives. That's one of the main key indicators that students are finding theme versus main idea. On the 'main idea' side, I'll put that a main idea is a summary of what the story was mostly about. There's that using the determining importance reading comprehension strategy to try to pull out the most important details. Then I'll also say that the main idea applies to the story only. There is a real big difference. Theme can apply to our own lives, it's a lesson that we're learning that can be applied to our own lives. The main idea only applies to the story, the things that happen to the character and plot in the storyline, those are specific things that happen in the story and aren't necessarily applicable to us as readers. I also say that main ideas often refer to specific characters and events so I put right on the on the anchor chart the difference between theme and main idea. I think by starting with this, it's a really easy way for students to see the difference between theme and main idea. I keep this chart up all year long after we've talked about it so that I can refer back to it. As soon as a student starts to tell me a theme and it really is a main idea, I can point to the chart and say, 'Okay, look at this. It sounds like you're telling me a summary. It sounds like the main idea is applying only to the story'. It really helps to draw the students back into what they're really doing. Are they telling me the theme or are they telling the main idea? I'll put an image of the anchor chart that I have used over in the show notes. I also have a freebie that I'll talk about a little bit later on in the podcast that includes this anchor chart as well. You can use the one that I've been using with my students and use it in your own classroom. That's the first main challenge that I come across when teaching theme to students is that they confuse main idea with theme.
The second challenge that I see with students when we're talking about theme is that students are often coming up with topics, not theme. Let me explain what I mean. I'll be completely honest, this is how I used to teach them. I used to teach topics and not theme. Here's what I mean. We say that friendship is a theme or love was the theme or loyalty was the theme of the story. Really, those are topics. What we want to do is have students expand on those topics into themes. Loyalty by itself doesn't really tell me anything about the story. It's just a word. It's just the topic. What about loyalty? That will be the theme. What about friendship? Or what about love? Take those topics and expand on them. How I do this is I use the story mountain. Now, if you are unfamiliar with the story mountain, I will link to a resource over in the show notes at classroonnook.com/podcast/70. It's a LINKtivity Interactive Learning Guide that really helps to illustrate what a story mountain is and how you can apply the story mountain to a story that a student is reading. Essentially a story mountain goes by a lot of different names. I call it a story mountain. You might call it something different, but it's a visual representation of how the events in a story work together to create the plot. You're likely familiar with this, at the bottom of the story Mountain there's the background knowledge. Then you have the rising action in the critical event or the climax. Then you have the falling action and the solution and conclusion. We are going to use this story mountain to help our students develop theme. We'll use this story mountain to review the story and have students come up with words or phrases that represent the story. After they've filled out their story mountain, they've written down the rising action events and the climax in the falling action in the solution and conclusion, we're going to have them look back at their story mountain and think about words that represent the different events of the story or the different characters of the story and make a list of those words or phrases. I'm going to give you an example of this in just a minute but just to be clear, this is where I begin. I begin with the story mountain because these are going to help us develop those topics that are then going to expand into themes. If you're not already using a story mountain and you want some help on how to teach it to your students, head over to the show notes and I've got a LINKtivity over there for you to use.
To help you understand how I use the story mountain and work my way towards theme, I want to use the book, The One and Only Ivan. It's a great story if you haven't read it, it's by Katherine Applegate. I will link to it in the show notes in case you want to check it out. I was going to try to summarize it for you, but I'm terrible at doing that on the fly so I'm just going to read the summary for you that I found on Amazon. It goes like this in case you haven't read the story. Ivan is an easygoing gorilla living at the exit eight big top mall and video arcade. He has grown accustomed to humans watching him through the glass walls of his domain. He rarely misses his life in the jungle. In fact, he hardly ever thinks about it at all. Instead, Ivan thinks about TV shows he's seen and about his friends, Stella, an elderly elephant, and Bob, a stray dog. But mostly, Ivan thinks about art and how to capture the tastes of a mango or the sound of leaves with color and a well-placed line. Then he meets Ruby, a baby elephant taken from her family, and she makes Ivan see his home and his own art through new eyes. When Ruby comes, change comes with her and it's up to Ivan to make a change for the better. There's your summary. It's such a wonderful story. Make sure you check it out. Through the story and after plugging in all the main events and the characters on the story mountain, you can come up with several topics that represent the story, The One and Only Ivan. Some of these topics are animal rights, because it raises the question as to whether or not Ivan should be kept at this mall inside of a cage, essentially, instead of being out in the wild. The topic of friendship obviously comes up because the animals that live in the big top mall all become friends and support each other. There's determination when Ivan decides he wants to break free and break out of the the big top model. Then, of course, the topic of freedom is important. Making promises comes up because he makes a promise to one of the other characters that he will finally get out and live his life out in the jungle. Then, of course, the final topic that brings it all together is that topic of 'home' once Ivan is able to get out of the big top mall. He is finally home. Those are the topics that can come out of The One and Only Ivan. We have animal rights, friendship, determination, freedom, making promises and home. What I have students do from here is we make a list of these topics and determine which of the topics are the most relevant to the story. When you're initially brainstorming these topics, you might have a bunch of words on there that are relevant to the story, but they maybe just represent a small portion of the story. You want to eliminate those topics and those words and phrases that may not represent the entire story as a whole. We narrowed down our list to just one, two, maybe three topics, which could be words or phrases that represent the story.
I'm going to take the word 'home' because that one is a word that's brought up over and over throughout the story. Ivan wants to be home in the cage. He doesn't feel like he's home and so on. That's one of the most relevant words or topics from our list that we've brainstormed. This is where most teachers stop. They say 'home', there's your theme, the theme of home. Well, I want to encourage you to take it the next step. What about home? We talked earlier, when we were discussing the difference between theme and main idea is that a theme often represents what an author believes about a specific topic. I encourage students to expand on that topic by using a what's called 'author belief statement'. It's so simple, it starts like this. The sentence starter is 'The author believes that...' and then you take your topic, your word or phrase to complete the sentence. In this case, the word was home. You might say something like this. "The author believes that a home should be a place where you feel safe and happy". We're basically just taking that word that we had brainstormed and we're deciding what we think the author feels about home based on the events and the characters of the story. That's where the story mountain comes into play. You're going to refer back to it often to one, help you come up with these topics in the first place but then to use evidence from the story mountain to support your thinking, to support that author belief statement. All put together the statement is "The author believes that a home should be a place where you feel safe and happy". The last piece of the puzzle to get your theme statement is you take off that 'The author believes that' part of the sentence and you're left with "A home should be a place where you feel safe and happy". That's your theme, not home. What about home? A home should be a place where you feel safe and happy. That beginning part of the sentence, the sentence started, "The author believes that..." That is just for the students to get their brains thinking to help them formulate their theme. Once you remove that portion of the sentence, you're left with just your theme statement.
By doing this, it's so much easier for students to come up with a theme because they're referring back to their story mountain. They've got the evidence right in front of them and they're taking it step by step. They're not just saying, 'Okay, I finished the book. What's the theme?' They're looking at the main events, the most important parts of the story. They're coming up with topic words and then they're taking those topic words and plugging them into the author believes sentence. Then they're removing the first part of the sentence to come up with their theme statement. It's these little stepping stones from finishing the story and thinking through the story to then coming up with a statement. It's not this huge leap that often a lot of us do when we ask students to develop a theme of a story. In a lot of cases, there's more than one overarching theme to the story so you don't want six or seven themes. That's too much, because now the relevance is getting less and less the more themes that you have. There may be two, maybe three, depending on the length of the story and the complexity of the story. If you feel that there may be more than one theme, you're just going to repeat this process. You're going to go back to your list of topics, pick the next most relevant topic, use it and plug it in to the author believe statement and then take that first part of the sentence off and you have your theme statement. I have a graphic organizer that I use with this and it's really simple. It just has a spot for them to write down key words and phrases after looking at the story mountain and then it has a couple places for them to construct. "The author believes that..." statement. I have put together this freebie for you if you want to grab it. It includes the anchor chart that I use to discuss the difference between theme and main idea. It also has a story mountain template that you can use to record the main events. the rising action, and following action and all that about the story mountain. You can use that with your students and it includes an anchor chart to go with that, as well as this graphic organizer, that you can then give your students to help them construct their themes. Like I said, it's free for you. It's over in our show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/70, it's in our Members Resource Library. If you are not already a member, I will give you a link that you can use in the show notes so you can grab this freebie inside our Members Resource Library.
Speaker1:
You know I'm going to tell you that this is going to take a lot of practice, right? Of course it is. Everything that we teach students takes practice and modeling and all the good things to get it so that students have it stick in their brains. I love this strategy for teaching theme because I think it takes the complexity out of how to develop a theme out and gives students a step by step process for developing this theme. A theme is only as good as the text evidence that you have to support the theme, right? So after you have completed that process of developing the topics and then translating them into author belief statements and then into a theme statement all on its own, now you need to go back into the text with the students and help them to find the evidence that supports the theme. You can do this real simply, you can obviously do it as a whole group. If you're doing this for the first time, you could also take all of your theme statements if you have more than one or take the one theme if there's only one, and write the theme on top of a piece of chart paper. Again, if you only have one theme, write that theme on a couple different chart paper so that you can spread out throughout the class and have small groups work on this together. If you have more than one theme, then you're going to write one theme per paper and then divide your students into groups and have them go to this chart paper, give them some markers and have them go back into the story or use their story mountain if they have that in front of them to find evidence to support the theme. On that chart, they're just going to write in bullet form shorthand what the events are that support that particular theme. This is a great group activity and it's a great way for them to collaborate and think through the process together. Then if you want to turn this into a writing assignment, students can take their theme statement and say the theme of the story was blank and then give us some supporting details why and it makes a great end of book activity for your students.
Let's take this a step further. You're going to model this and do this as a whole class, or if you're working in a guided reading group, you're going to do it together first. Then I want to encourage you with more stories that you read. Any story that a theme can be applied to. You should be doing this step by step strategy with your students. You can first do it with a group and then you can break it up and start allowing students to come up with these words and phrases on their own to help them develop their theme. I think that you'll find that once you do this as a whole group and you model it, you practice it with each story that you do this particular strategy with, you're going to find that they're going to be able to come up with those topics quicker and they're going to be able to find even more relevant topics as they look back at their story mountain and the discussions and conversations that you're going to have around them are going to become richer. I really love this strategy. I think that you're going to like it a lot, too.
All right, let's wrap this up. I really do feel that so many teachers teach theme the wrong way, myself included, until I came across this strategy, we want our students to come up with more than just topics, more than just those one or two word phrases. We want them to develop a theme statement that not only tells the topic, but goes well beyond that. It all begins with the story mountain by filling out the story mountain and putting all the good information on the story mountain so that they can then come up with those topics, those relevant words and phrases that represent the story, and then take those words and phrases and translate them and transform them into an author believe statement that then becomes their theme statement. Now we have this clear step by step pathway that we can give to our students and we can repeat over and over with each story that we read. It eliminates us asking our students to take that giant leap from a simple prompting question into a theme. We've bridge that gap. We've given them the step by step formula that they can use again and again. Remember, I have that freebie for you over at the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/70.
If you found this episode helpful, this little mini workshop style, let me know by leaving a rating and review of this podcast that helps other teachers find their way to us. It's a great way to give me a virtual high 5. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I will be back again next week with an extra special episode that I'm really excited about! Something fun that we're going to be doing this summer as we wrap up the school year so stay tuned to that. I will be back again next week with another episode. Bye for now.
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