Welcome back from break. I hope you were all able to relax. We started new logs today--they will be due on Monday 11/7 with 150 minutes logged. We read for 10 minutes then discussed the idea that themes surround us in life, we listened to about a minute and a half of Taylor Swift's Safe and Sound and talked about the possible themes in this song. We came up with several different ones and realized that this text can have more than one theme. I reminded students that all narrative texts have themes within them-- When we and literary critics search for these themes, we ask questions like, "What is this text really about?" or "What is this text trying to teach me about life?" Then we often explore those ideas more closely by writing long about them.
We then talked about the idea that Ray Bradbury's story "All Summer in a Day" does try to teach us about life. I modeled the steps to writing a thematic essay by following the idea of jealousy through the story (see the chart linked for the steps).
Students then found other themes in the story. We noticed that it was easier to identify what the story was about than to identify what the author was trying to teach. With some support, everyone was able to identify a theme and we had a pretty good list of many different lessons presented in the story.
Tomorrow's work will be done with Nightjohn so be sure to bring those books to class.
Tonight's homework is to read for 20 minutes and write long about a possible theme in your book. You can do this by choosing to write long on a post-it you have kept about a central problem or just by working through the steps outlined in class. If you are stuck on ways to extend your writing, try these ideas to help you write more. this needs to be in the reflections section of your notebook.
