Tips for Teaching Language Arts (Theme)
1. Meet your students where they are.
Plan reading and discussion around questions that your students are already grappling with, from What does it mean to be a good friend? When you connect your literature themes to character development and what’s going on in students’ lives, your discussions will hopefully resonate deeply with them.
2. Start with concrete details.
Before they can identify and work with the theme of a story, your students need to have a strong grasp of the details: setting, character, plot. When they work with theme, they have to breakdown all the information into an understanding message. Use anchor charts to outline the elements of the story or give students a graphic organizer to follow.
3. Clarify the difference between theme and main idea.
Many students have difficulty differentiating between the main idea and the theme. The theme is the underlying message that the author wants to convey, whereas the main idea is what the story is mostly about. Teach these concepts separately and together. You might practice identifying themes and main ideas using Disney films or the stories your students read last year in order to have a common reference point. After you review as a class, give students a list of themes and main ideas and challenge them to work in pairs to create matches.
4. Scaffold the learning.
Theme is a difficult concept to learn. Unlike some other like setting or plot, theme is subtle and subjective.
5. Approach theme from different directions.
Be ready to answer questions about theme a few different ways because you never know which question will come up with students. Some questions that will encourage thinking about theme are: What did the author want us to think about? What idea stays with you?

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