Describing the central message or theme (Inclusive Big Idea #2)

Reading Literature

Grade 4: English Language Arts

Inclusive Big Idea #2: Describing the central message or theme

Standard: Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text. RL.4.2

• Anchor Text: Use an anchor text such as Number the Stars by Lois Lowry to explore the themes of bravery and friendship. Learn more about accessing grade-level text in this TIP Sheet.
• Storyboards: To illustrate the major plot points of the story, have students craft a pictorial representation of the action on a comic storyboard or using a digital tool. Have students summarize the set of events from the story and discuss theme or central idea.
• Story Map: During and after reading or listening to a text, create a story map on an interactive whiteboard. The story map should contain the essential elements of the story (characters, setting, major plot points, resolution). The elements can be written, verbal, or drawn. After the completion of the story and the story map, work collaboratively with the students to create a summary of the story. Learn more about graphic organizers in this TIP Sheet.
• GIST: GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text) is a strategy that asks readers to condense or summarize a text by generating a summary in their own words. For simple texts, students can provide the GIST by identifying some of the main events from the story. In longer read aloud texts, encourage students to stop every few pages and tell the GIST of what was read so far. Model how understanding the GIST can help you to determine theme.
• Anchor Chart: To help students understand details from the text, co-construct an anchor chart that describes literary elements such as characters, setting, plot, central message, and theme.
• Think, Pair, Share: Ask students to summarize the story. They can write, draw, or craft the summary. Then, the student shares with a peer. After the pairs share, a couple of teams can share with the rest of the class. Learn more about Think, Pair, Share in this TIP Sheet.
• Story Chain: Group students together or have them choose partners. The first student will tell one sentence about the story to the student next to them. Subsequent students continue the sequence. They can state the sentence verbally, draw, or use other media.
• Story Sorting: Visually represent the events of the story by making picture cards of each event. This can be on paper or digital media. Then, individually, in small groups, or with the whole class, sort the events in order. As students sort, verbally summarize the various events.
• Think Aloud: To model summarization, periodically, stop and summarize what was just read using just one sentence (e.g., “That paragraph was mostly about _______”). At the end of the story, provide another summary of the entire text to students. Show them how you can go from the summary to determine the theme. Record your ideas so students have a bulleted list or graphic organizer of how to summarize.
• Sketch-to-Stretch: Sketch-to-stretch is a way for students to capture the central message through drawing. After the students have completed reading or listening to a story, they can draw or create (e.g., by pasting illustrations, using digital media) a visual representation about the central message the author is trying to convey. They can use examples and details from the text to inform their drawings.
• Discuss to Understand: As students are reading or listening to particular sections of the text, have a series of questions available to help students determine the central message. Help facilitate this by asking questions such as:
  • What is this story really about?
  • What do you think the author wants you to learn from this story?
  • What lessons do you think the characters learned?

For example, one possible barrier is the amount of information that the lesson requires a student to hold in mind.

Ideas to reduce this barrier could include:

• chunk information, so there is not too much information presented at one time
• annotate readings or provide key questions to look for in an article or video
• use outlines, Venn Diagrams, T-charts, or ways to organize information
• continue to use objects and multimedia when appropriate

Use these Inclusive Strategies to help reduce barriers.

• Why are Main Idea and Theme important?
  • Whether reading a story, a comic, or a poem, the ability to determine the main idea, theme, and supporting details is a lifelong skill readers use to foster higher level thinking and deeper comprehension.
  • To share their comprehension of a story, text, or topic, students must be able to restate the main idea and other key details to summarize their understanding. Main ideas and details can be explicitly stated in the text while central idea, moral, or theme require various degrees of inference to determine, but must be supported by details from the text.
• What Vocabulary Should I Know and Teach?
  • summary- containing the key points and big ideas
  • main idea- the most important idea in the text
  • details- specific smaller elements that support a larger work
  • key word- essential or significant words related to the text or topic
  • relevant- has significant importance to the topic or text
  • irrelevant- not important or related
  • characters- person/persons in a story
  • setting- place where the story happens
  • plot- sequence of events involving characters in conflict situations
  • point of view- perspective from which the story is told
  • theme- moral or big idea of the story
  • inference- a conclusion or opinion that is formed based on facts or evidence not directly stated in a text
  • context clues- words and sentences within a text that provide additional information and support a reader’s ability to make a conclusion about what happens in a text
• What is Theme?
  • The central and underlying meaning of the story.
  • The big idea the author wants the reader to take away from the text-- the writer’s view of the world or a revelation about human nature.
• What are Some Common Themes Found in Literature?
  • Acceptance: These stories have characters who respect and accept others’ differences and beliefs.
  • Courage: These stories have brave characters who have the strength to overcome a fear or accept a risk.
  • Perseverance: These stories have characters who never give up, even when facing difficult times.
  • Cooperation: These stories have characters who work together to solve a problem or achieve a goal.
  • Compassion: These stories have characters who want to make those who are suffering feel better.
  • Honesty: These stories have characters who find that it is best to always tell the truth.
  • Kindness/Love: These stories have friendly characters who are generous and considerate of others.
  • Loyalty/Friendship: These stories have characters who trust each other and never turn their backs on their friends.
  • Coming-of-age: These stories have characters passing through major stages of development/growing up.
  • Family/Belonging: These stories have characters who find similarities with family or friends and use these characteristics to bond.
• How Can You Find the Theme?
  • It is common for stories to have multiple themes. Theme can be stated explicitly or implicitly. For example, fables explicitly state the theme at the end.
  • Unlike the main idea which requires information from an entire text, the theme can often be found at the conclusion of the story.
  • Most often, readers have to infer the theme based on character traits, motivations, actions, emotions, and values.
  • Some sample questions about theme:
    • What message did you take away from reading this text? Which clues helped you determine this theme?
    • Which passage in the text is most significant? Why?
    • How do the changes the main character undergoes help you determine the message of the book?
    • What affected your interpretation of the theme the most: the plot, the characters, the setting?
• What is Main Idea?
  • The main idea is what the paragraph or story is mostly about. All the sentences are joining together to give the reader a message. You may encourage students to look for main ideas in other media, such as videos or songs.
  • Sometimes the main idea is directly stated within the passage. Other times, it is inferred, which means the reader has to “read between the lines” and figure it out on their own.
• Why Teach Main Idea?
  • When the main idea is present at the beginning of a text, it alerts the reader to upcoming information and helps them set a purpose for reading. This leads to a greater understanding of the text.
  • It provides the reader with a framework for understanding and recalling the important ideas in the text.
  • Learning how to identify the main idea will help readers remember what they read and improve their comprehension.
• How Do I Teach Main Idea?
  • Begin by identifying the main idea at the sentence level, then practice with a paragraph, and finally with an entire selection.
  • Teach students that main idea is sometimes expressed as a topic sentence usually found in the beginning of the text.
  • Finding the central theme or idea is not limited to text, but can be found in movies, cartoons, plays, and more.
  • Teaching the Main Idea-- Continuum
    1. Identify the key words of a sentence
    2. Identify key words or topic of a paragraph
    3. Identify the topic sentence of a paragraph
    4. Recognize the explicitly stated point of a paragraph
    5. Infer the main idea of a paragraph
    6. Recognize the relationships among ideas in related paragraphs in longer selections
    7. Infer relationships among ideas in related paragraphs in longer selections
    8. Determine main idea or central message of an entire text.
• How Do I Identify Key Words?
  • Mastery of identifying key words at the sentence level is essential in order for students to move on to larger bodies of text.
  • Begin at the sentence level to identify key words that help deepen understanding of the central theme:
    • The small pig was frightened by the big, bad wolf.
    • Who is the sentence about? It’s about a small pig.
    • What about that small pig? or What happens to the small pig? It’s frightened by the wolf.
  • Once mastery at the sentence level is achieved, move on to identifying key words of a paragraph. Model how to highlight important words and discuss their meaning within the paragraph.

Common Student Misconceptions

• Retelling: Students may think that retelling a story is the same as theme- and it is not. When retelling a story, information should be presented in the same order in which it happened to ensure students understood the cause and effect relationship for events and other story characteristics.
• Theme: Theme is rarely stated directly in the text. Students must infer theme based on details presented in the text. Learn more about inference with this TIP Sheet. Main idea and theme are often confused as being the same. Although both can be related, theme is a broad topic, whereas main idea is more specific. (For example, nature may be the theme of a story, whereas the main idea is “littering is bad”).
• Main Idea: Students may have difficulty determining what essential information is. Students often misinterpret details as being the main idea and need to be guided to see the author’s overall point or the ‘big picture’. It is also important to note that the main idea is not simply what the text is about. For example, in Jack and the Beanstalk, selling the cow is a detail in the story but is not essentially related to the main idea.
• Summarizing: Teachers sometimes mistakenly believe that students have the ability to determine what is essential within a text. Explicit teaching is often required for students to learn this skill.
• Story Elements: Students often miss aspects of story elements when summarizing a text. In addition, some texts are considered “inconsiderate” texts and do not provide enough to allow students to fully understand all story elements and must fill in the gaps with prior experiences and personal preferences, leading to problems with comprehension.
• Building Background Knowledge: Many teachers assume students already know about a topic based on their age or what they should have learned in a previous grade or class. When background knowledge is not built or activated, students will lack the schema to understand new material and may not effectively learn and understand the topic or concept.

Links Across Content Areas

• Social Studies: Develop a unit based on a theme which can also be found in literary texts (e.g., acceptance) and then share cultural examples of the same theme in history.
• Music: Select the theme song of a movie students are familiar with and discuss why that music is an effective theme song.

Everyday Connections

• Hanging Out: Encourage students to think about a story from their life (a fight with a friend on the playground, a time they got a new toy, etc.) or a favorite cartoon, book, play, or comic and tell about the main message or theme. 

Third Grade: Describe the central message or theme; Summarize a text (RL 2)

Fourth Grade: Compare and contrast elements of texts (RL 9)

Fifth Grade: Describe the central message or theme; Summarize a text (RL 2)