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.
