November/December Reading Unit:
Identifying Themes
The goal of this unit is to help the students understand that comprehending books is not just about understanding the plot of the story, instead, comprehending books means thinking about the ideas within books. We want to help kids become more thoughtful as they read, understanding tha books are about ideas. We want readers to develop the habit of asking themselves:
- What is this story really about?
- What themes or messages are buried in the text?
- What evidence to I have to support my thinking?
- What lesson can I learn about life after reading this story?
To help the students throughout this process, they will be introduced to Big Life Topics. BLTs are the general topics that show up in books. Once we have identified the BLTs, we then begin the work of narrowing down themes.
Below you will see examples of the Big Life Topics we will be covering in class, and some of the possible themes that can be developed from these BLTs.
In order to develop our skills in developing themes, we will be reading a number of short stories together and having conversations geared towards identifying BLTs as well as the themes that show up across multiple texts. Some of the texts we will be reading throughout this unit are:
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