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Comparing Themes Across Books: Planning & Preparation

There are three main components to my Reading Workshop: Mini-Lesson / Practice & Conferring / Small Group (strategy groups or Literature Circles).  So far I have talked a lot about conferring and Literature Circles, so I'm going to talk more about Mini-Lessons and how all of this comes together in a unit.  To be honest, I don't think all of these components have really come together for me until the unit I am doing right now, which I'm generically calling "Comparing Themes Across Books."

Planning the Unit

What should students be able to do?

Students have been practicing finding themes in short stories, poems, and literature circle novels throughout the year.  Students have also been encouraged to think about and explore themes in their independent reading; however, most students need more work identifying themes in longer novels.  Additionally, standards RL.5.9 and RL.6.9 expect students to be able to compare themes across novels.  With this in mind, I determined that I want students to be able to...
  • identify multiple themes in one novel
  • compare themes across two novels
  • explain the greater impact of one theme represented in both novels

How will students accomplish these goals?

Once I determined what I wanted students to be able to do, I referenced The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo in order to come up with a list of strategies for each goal.  

Here are the skills I want to teach with the strategies or guiding questions to support students.

How will I differentiate to meet the needs of each student?

Once I planned the strategies I could use in mini-lessons or conferences, I also though about how to help students set individual goals within the whole class study.  The best way I have found to do this is to use Lucy Calkins' reading progressions.  These helps students figure out where they are along a continuum for each skill and how they could push themselves further.  I made a copy of the "Determining Themes" progression for each student to use.  

Here is one student's progression.  She showed that she is working toward being able to accomplish everything in this column.  She also circled "quote" to indicate that this is an area she especially needs to work on.

My students seem to be really honest when using the learning progressions, so I have my own copy of the progression, where I put each student in the column he/she chose.  This allows me to have a quick overview of where the class is at with a skill. I can also reference it when meeting with individual students to determine how to push them to the next "level" with a skill.

Key Texts 


Key Takeaways

  • Plan the strategies you could use ahead of time and have a way to reference them
  • Give students a way to self-assess before the unit -- I have found the Learning Progressions to be the best way to do this
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