Theme

I believe it was with the story "The Dot" that I came across Theme again. The lesson in the teacher's manual was boring, again, so I did a little net search and came across this book called Enemy Pie. My library didn't have it, but lucky for me, it is one of the books featured on storylineonline.net. If you aren't familiar with that site, you should for sure check it out. On the site, actors and actresses read books aloud to you in video form. The students will think they are watching a movie, but in reality, they are getting to hear a book and see the illustrations close-up, as well. For my lesson, we reviewed Theme(the big idea) and we watched the reading of Enemy Pie. It is read by an actress who is on the show "The Practice." After listening to the story, we had a discussion about the Theme of the story and talked about what it means to be a friend, etc. I found a pie coloring page on the internet and each student put adjectives to describe a friend in thier pie. While they were making their pies, I made a Wordle (word cloud) at wordle.net using the words they provided for me from the story and from our discussion. This is a really cute story that teaches a great lesson.