Book Smarts

Build understanding of theme with an activity designed for The Cay and the Common Core. Small groups or pairs use graphic organizers to determine themes, find and record related details from the text, and formulate theme statements. In...

If your language arts learners have a hard time determining the universal theme of a written work, use a straightforward learning exercise to help them find it. After reviewing a list of common themes, kids note the title, character,...

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. 

The theme of a work is not a single word! Rather it is a statement that reflects what a writer believes or wants readers to understand about a topic or subject. Here's a short, but powerful lesson that utilizes passages from The...

Feeling the pressure to confirm is something any adolescent can relate to. Explore an essential theme with a response to literature assessment that prompts learners to identify main ideas with evidence and supporting details.

What is theme, and how can you find themes in literary works? These and other questions are answered by a colorful and engaging presentation that not only defines the term but also provides easy to understand examples. The slides...

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...

So many themes are expertly woven through Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. On the first page, scholars will read five themes, selecting an incident and a quote to highlight that theme. On page two, they use chapters 29-31 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.