Theme

Theme

Right now our 5th grade readers are learning about theme and how to determine the theme of a story.  Students are now being asked to not only think of the theme, but they are to also use evidence in defending the theme they chose. 

We have reviewed that theme is the message that an author has in their story and is trying to tell the reader.  We know that we have to infer the theme, and the best way to do that is to use our inference equation, which is Background Knowledge + Text Clues = Inference.  We also know that there may be more than one theme in a story, and that it is open to logical interpretation, which makes theme a little complicated! 

We have read Teammates  and The Lotus Seed to practice finding theme, and we are now about to read books that we have already read in class to practice some more.  This theme work ties right in with our writing, since we are also teaching our readers a theme in our personal narratives!  

Here is a picture of our class paragraph that we created together when choosing a theme regarding the story Teammates.