Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Standard 09-11-2012

Themes! Themes!  Everywhere there're themes!  Helping me understand what the author means!

With apologies to the musical group Five Man Electrical Band, (I'll sign your Archer card if you can tell me why I apologized), I'd like to take a moment and celebrate themes.  We spent some time today working with them.  I'll be honest, the work we did in Period four was much more effective than the work we did in Period three.  Period three, that means we'll be taking a step back tomorrow.

Yet some of the basics still managed to get across.  We clearly defined theme as the following:

a theme is a sentence
a theme is a moral or a message (point the author is trying to get across)
a theme is a general statement about life

If you can remember these concepts, then the theme will be easier for you to identify and defend.  We talked about several key words or topics that often are transformed into sentences that become themes.  Here are some of them:

hope               loyalty                           friendship
                                    family                                            personal growth
       acceptance                                                                                                   responsibility
                                 power                              education                curiosity
  courage                                  hard work                        pride
                   prejudice

and a few others...

We are meeting one of the critical Common Core standards by discussing theme.   It will be an idea that comes back again and again and again.  If you learn it now, you'll be better off later.

To help you learn it, I had you turn the words/topics into themes and then offer real life examples of those one sentence themes.  Throughout the year, you will read literature that contain these themes.  This will then enable you to make connections between different texts which lead to even more standards.  Yeah!

IMC tomorrow.  Theme work tomorrow.  "The Treasure of Lemon Brown" tomorrow.  See you tomorow.

No comments:

Post a Comment