When students learn about theme it can, at times, be a very difficult concept for them to grasp. The themes they typically encounter, and are far easier to understand are themes that are tangible such as a theme for a party, commonalities between topics and ideas of songs/movies or a repeated subject in a work of art. These types of themes are seen and heard, not discovered through the inferencing of text. When there is nothing to see; when the only way to find the theme of a story is to read between the lines, students can have quite a bit of difficulty.
While I have never thought of using thematic picture books in a secondary English classroom, doing so might actually prove very successful. For my thematic set I chose Emily’s Art by Peter Catalanotto, Drawing Lessons from a Bear by David McPhail and Blue Goose by Nancy Tafuri. In conjunction with introducing the concept of theme, a thematic set like this one would give the students something tangible when learning this concept. They would see the obvious theme with art and drawing/painting, but in reading the text they can also easily find the themes of the stories without having to wade through the complicated language of more difficult texts typically found in middle and high school classrooms. Within the three books on art we can find the theme of doing something you love, in this particular case drawing and painting, and being proud of it and sharing it with others. Though I do have some reservations about my older students “buying” into the idea of using picture books in the classroom, I definitely want to try it to see if it is a way to ease them into finding themes in their regular classroom texts.
Christy- I absolutely agree! I think that picture books could be a valuable tool for even high school students to learn and internalize the concept of theme.