Four Steps for Teaching Theme in Middle School

This is my 14th year of teaching. Twelve of those years have been spent teaching 6th and 7th graders. And that means that for twelve years, I've been trying to get middle schoolers to wrap their heads around the important, yet tricky concept of THEME.

Today, I'm going to take you through the step-by-step process that I use to get my students to:

1. Define the term "theme."
2. Recognize the theme of a story.
3. Write a theme sentence.
4. Explain in writing, using text evidence, how the author develops the theme of the story.

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1. Define the term "theme."

At this point in their school careers, my kids pretty much know what the term "theme" means. So, we quickly go over some notes that we put in their notebooks. (If you've read my blog over the years, then the Sketch Notes that I use are nothing new! You can find them here.)

2. Recognize the theme of a story.

Next, we read a couple of short stories and picture books and practice finding their themes. We use a few of the activities from this:

And I do any reteaching/small group work with my struggling learners using these:

3. Writing a theme sentence.

As kids are working on identifying the theme of the short stories and picture books we are reading, we also start practicing how to write a clear, strong theme sentence. I really like how the video does it and I use a lot of the language and strategies from this video with my students.

4. Explain in writing, using text evidence, how the author develops the theme of the story.

So up until now, pretty much everything we've been doing with theme has been a review. The kids have had lots of prior experience identifying the theme of the story. They might not have mastered it yet, but it's familiar. However, using evidence from the story to defend their theme statement is pretty new. 

No doubt, getting kids to explain all the clues that they used to infer a story's theme is HARD. It is also tedious work to put their thinking into writing, so I try my best to make parts of it fun and interesting, otherwise my class quickly becomes a snooze-fest! Enter learning stations! Anytime I can work stations into my lessons, I do, because the collaboration and moving around is always a great way to increase engagement. 

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The idea behind these stations is basically that the author leaves the reader clues throughout a story to help us infer theme. In my room, we talk about four places to look for these clues: 1.) the title and symbols, 2.) the plot, 3.) the characters, and 4.) the setting.

I set up a station for each one of these "clues" with several guiding questions for the kids to consider and discuss. They also take notes on their thinking/discussion while at the station.

After the students have traveled to all four stations, they have a notes sheet full of all the evidence that helped us infer the theme of our story. This makes it so helpful when it comes time to write out our answer to "What is the theme of the story? Use evidence from the text to support your thinking."

If you want to make yourself these Theme Stations, you can grab them FOR FREE here:

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How do you teach theme? I love to hear your ideas! Share below, or hop on over to Facebook and share there!