Building Stronger Theme Statements: Elevating and Developing Theme
Theme is one of those ELA standards that's taught every. year. And every year, students struggle with the concept.
By middle school, students are usually familiar with identifying the definition of theme and can talk through getting it to being a life lesson. However, what I find students struggle with most is creating strong theme statements. Oftentimes, they identify a theme as a word and not a life lesson. Or, they will write it as what the character learned, not what the reader learned.
For example, they will say the theme is friendship. While, this can potentially be a theme, it is more a motif (more on that later). Also, they may also write "Susie learned that...".
We want them to get to an overall life lesson that us as readers can learn.
I've come up with a couple ways to fix this!
Activity 1: Motifs leading to theme.
A big way to elevate theme, is to start with teaching students motifs. Motifs are ideas that authors return to often, over and over again. For example, rejection, jealousy, friendship, etc...these are often confused to be the theme.
From there, students can create an actual theme. What does one learn ABOUT that motif? That's the theme!
I have a few activities I do to get students to wrap their head around this. I essentially have them do it three different ways, three different times; first with me, then with a partner, and then independently.
For each portion of their work, they read/watch the story. Then, they list several motifs that could be in the story. From there, they determine moments that support the motif. That's super important...if they can't support the motif, it's not a good motif.
From there, they create a theme statement that states what one learns about the motif. This is a nice scaffold into creating strong theme statements.
Eventually, I do have them do this in their first unit of study, A Deep Study of Character. They apply it to their independent reading books. It's a very similar concept as above.
Activity 2: Crafting more theme statements
Another common thing I notice about my 6th graders coming up from elementary school is they often are very good at identifying basic themes. They can determine strong life lessons. That's good! However, they really need to start thinking more deeply; always using the standard lessons doesn't really show that deeper comprehension.
This next lesson focuses on creating themes from those standard themes. First, they list important events in the story provided. This is crucial, because all these moments lead to a lesson. From there, they list standard life lessons they could learn from those events (prior to that, you have a discussion about common themes).
The last part is the sentence frame. They start with the the common theme and then elaborate. Take a look below. Once they learn to use this basic frame, they can use it for any story. Using these frames gets them to make a bit more concise.
Bottom Line:
We all know there will be a theme question on the state tests. Before students can even think about text detail, elaboration, etc., they have to be able to identify theme!
You can get this entire activity here:
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