Jan's New Home: Plot Review and Theme Discovery

Our story for this past week was "Jan's New Home." To begin the lesson I had the students review what they had previously learned about plot. Instead of writing a lot like last time, we drew pictures to depict the plot.

I created a brochure booklet on Microsoft Publisher to aid in this process. The students were divided into groups again and worked together to draw pictures of Jan's feelings at the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

The next day we talked about a new topic: theme. After discussing as a class what the theme of "Jan's New Home" was I had the students work individually on writing what the theme was on a worksheet I created. This was the reinforce to them the theme of the story and see how they did individually.

As a final activity of the week, I had the students write letters to Jan pretending it was their school Jan was coming to. They did a great job with this activity and it helped move them into a higher level of thinking and interacting with the characters.