Theme of a Story... the tricky task

Many students are finding it increasingly difficult to determine the "Theme" of a story in their books. Theme is a higher level of thinking than most students have been asked to do, especially before third grade. Our transitional readers are ready for it, but have some things to sort out first. It's a hard objective, but they can do it! Some advice on thinking about theme: First, students must know how to make inferences while they are reading. This means to draw a conclusion based on what you've read and what you know. For example, seeing a young girl in a fancy dress holding a basket of flower petals would cause you to infer that she is a flower girl. (A student who is a proficient third grade reader would be doing this while they are reading.) Secondly, students need to know that theme is the life lesson of a story or the author’s message. Students need to understand that in most stories (with the exception of fables), the author will not tell readers what the theme or lesson of the story is. Readers will have to think about what the characters did wrong or right and what they can learn from the character’s experience. WOW! That is not an easy feat, and we are working on it at school as well. Remember that you aren't summarizing the text, your extracting life advice from it. It's "big stuff", not the small stuff.

What are we Learning?

Students in room 309 (as well as the rest of the land of Third Grade) have begun their study of fantasy as it pertains to Fairy Tales, Fables, Folk Tales, Myths, and Legends. We are taking all of those great lessons we've learned about inferential thinking and applying it to our new study. Students will be asking themselves, "What is the big learning we should be doing in this book? What does the author want me to learn?" While you are doing your big reading at home, take a moment to check out the READERS WORKSHOP link on my page to get some tips on how to support your student. In Writing we are studying realistic fiction writing. Students are taking creating a fictional character and using that character while writing stories that could really happen in real life. This week we are developing our character, discovering problems the character could have and then planning our stories with a beginning, middle and end. We'll also be using our knowledge of characters to show how a character uses motivation to solve those problems and include that in our story plans. We'll be taking a word work test on Friday to assess our ability to add -ed and -ing to words using a variety of rules. And finally, after a lesson on Veteran's Day (Monday) we'll be starting a study on Early American History with a focus on Columbus, the Founding Fathers and others who've made an impact on the development of the United States as we know it.