THEMES in Literature

There are 10 most common themes in literature:

Let’s go through each one and see if we can come up with an example of each one.  When I think of the judgement theme I think of Beauty and the Beast.  Do not judge a person by the way they look, who they are on the inside is what really counts.  The theme of survival can be found throughout Finding Nemo. Dory says, “When life gets you down, there’s nothing better to do than just keep swimming. A little determination goes a long way.” Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming.  Peace and War was a theme that was explored throughout the most recent Frozen 2 movie.  Love is a theme that could be found in all of these movies, but I would say The Little Mermaid story has an emphasis on love.  Heroism = Hercules, Good and Evil = Snow White, Circle of Life = Lion King, Suffering = Tangled, Deception = Frozen 1……. By now I think you see where I am going with this:

These universal themes are popular among authors and readers alike because they are experiences we can relate to.

Here is one of my home movies, can you guess what the theme is?

If you say  Coming of Age, I would applaud you right meow!

Part of the reason why we study theme is because through stories and experience we can learn how to cope, learn how to succeed and learn how rise up.  We may not relate to the plot (uh my nose is big but its nothing like Pinocchio’s) but we do relate to the theme (coming of age).  

Read the scenarios and match the theme using the following chart.

Use this following chart to match the theme to the scenario’s above.  Record your results in the text boxes below:

Record the theme in each corresponding box below:

Shel Silverstein is one of my favourite authors.  He wrote children’s books (The Giving Tree), poetry (Where the Sidewalk Ends )and song lyrics (He wrote lyrics for Johnny Cash).  Here are some songs he wrote the lyrics for:

Shel Silverstein was cool.

Read the following poem and complete the text boxes below:

 

Watch the follow visual interpretation of the Silverstein poem ‘Masks’ and complete the text boxes below:

The best types of challenging problems that a teacher can give to his students are math problems that require a couple steps.  Here is the classic type of question where a strategy demands you to do a couple separate calculations that come together at the end to solve a problem:

You are DONE!!!!!!