Thinking Beyond the Details to Identify the Theme

Students need to read for close-up, tiny details, but they also have to think beyond the text and make inferences. We need to help students learn to draw conclusions and identify the bigger picture, the main idea, or the theme. To get kids to do this is extremely hard. It’s a high-level thinking skill, but it’s one that is targeted on our state assessments.

One strategy for tackling this skill is to start a “theme board.” As students are learning about themes or main ideas, have them start a list of examples from texts you’ve already read and then continue to add to it. You can do it on a bulletin board and/or within their reading notebooks.

What are themes? They could be cliché, like “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Or they could represent intolerance or injustice like “never give up.” Other themes could revolve around courage, tradition, segregation, etc.

In addition to listing themes, have students identify what books, short stories, poems, or novels they have previously read that fall under those themes. What kids should start to notice is that the same kinds of themes keep coming up. We want students to step back from the reading and determine, What was the lesson the author was trying to teach us? What was the author’s purpose for writing this?