Lesson 1: Theme and Evidence

Learning Intentions

Define theme, context, and embedded evidence.
Identify the theme in the story and support your identification with textual evidence.
Embed evidence within contextual and relevant descriptions.

Essential Question

What is theme and why is it important?

Task 1: Think-Pair-Share Discussion

Think of a story you were told that had a message or a moral. Please describe the story and explain the message or moral.

Task 2: Make Predictions

Look at the images below. These images are all related to this lesson's short story: The Landlady by Roald Dahl.

Look at the images and try to predict:

Setting
Characters
Theme
Tone/Mood
Plot
Symbols

Task 3: Review Theme

Watch the video about theme before reading the story to help you better identify theme within a text.

As you read, try to identify themes, or big ideas, and consider what the author is trying to say about these ideas, otherwise known as their central message.

Task 4: Read the short story

Context Slides

Audiobook and Analysis

Click

here

to read the story as it is without text aids.

Task 5: Class Discussion

Using the itinerary, guiding questions, and timers, organize a student-led discussion.

Two students should facilitate the discussion.

The purpose of the discussion is to enhance our understanding of the text.

Itinerary, Guiding Questions, & Timers

Task 6: Writing Focus

This class, our writing focus will be EVIDENCE. Specifically, we will look at selecting, contextualising, and embedding evidence in order to enhance our written communication.

Watch this video before practice.

Task 7: Putting it all together!

Considering what you now know about theme, think about three themes or big ideas from the story. Then, using what you have learnt about selecting evidence, support the finding of these themes with the best evidence from the text.

The goal is that you contextualise and embed your evidence in a way that enhances your writing. You want to mix your words and the author's in a way which sounds like it is all coming from you.

Use this table to input your answers.