Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

What's theme, and can texts of every length have one? Explore the themes of fives short reading passages with your middle school class. Encourage them to highlight specific places in the text where they recognized the theme. 

Augment your unit on Carl Hiaasen's Hoot with a series of activities about the environment, civil disobedience, making an impact in the world, and growing up. A list of literary concepts and themes helps you to write your lessons to...

Colorful contemporary images contained in a PowerPoint presentation will capture the attention of class members and model for them the how to distinguish between the subject and the theme of a work. A great want to introduce this...

Are you are considering a unit on Beowulf or Superman, on myths, or tricksters? Here's a great overview you can use to launch a study of universal themes and archetypes. The focus here is on the oral tradition, but the concepts apply to...

Identifying the theme of a piece is crucial to understanding. Using the play Romeo and Juliet as an example, the concept of theme is explored in a video of a classroom lecture.

Discover some of the themes of Dr. Seuss's major books. They see that despite being written for young people, Dr. Seuss' books contain powerful messages and important themes.

Offer your learners some extra review with an online interactive reading comprehension exercise. They may respond to 5 multiple-choice questions based on the themes of Alice's Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass....

Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B" is featured in a lesson that asks pupils to first read a biography of Hughes and list things about his life they think are important. The class then reads the poem and compares what they learned...

Travel through Europe with ten-year-old Teddy Roosevelt in this writing activity, which uses the picture book My Tour of Europe: by Teddy Roosevelt, by Ellen Jackson. After reading the book, readers compare it to passages from The...

If your class is reading the historical fiction novel, Out of the Dust, then you are in luck. Here are a few slides that will help you provide historical context for the book, as well as define main characters, setting, symbolism, and...