Curriculum Standards

GSE (Georgia Standards of Excellence) / National Curriculum Standards

ELAGSE5RL2: Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how
characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic;
summarize the text.
ISTE Technology Standard
https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students
1. Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to
demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.

MODE OF INSTRUCTION

FACE TO FACE / ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS / ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS / HYBRID

Learning Objective/Goal(s)
The learning objective of the week is assuring that students understand what a theme is and how to
identify one. Last week, the students learned about main idea, which has similar characteristics to theme,
but are still different topics. With that being said, students will also learn the differences between theme
and main idea through a series of activities that are both group assignments and individually. These
activities come in the form of a YouTube and reading practice. As vocabulary is known for “have a
profound influence in reading comprehension”, there will be a practice that will be taken from Fisher and
Frey’s Improving Adolescent Literacy which suggests an “immersion in vocabulary”. As students need to
expand their vocabulary, there will be more difficult vocabulary words in some of the assignments to help
students have a bigger word bank to chose from when it comes to their personal writings.

The five components of a Learning Goal are centered on the Historically Responsive Framework
(Muhammad, 2020, p. 159):
● Identities: Students will be discussing the theme of their year last year.
● Skills: The skills that will be worked on during this week is supporting evidence, thorough reading,
and writing skills.
● Intellect: Students will become smarter in identifying and distinguishing the theme of a given work
of literature.
● Criticality:
● Assessment:
o Formative: Group and Class Discussions on theme
o Summative: Assignments that will be turned into Google Classroom.

Essential Goals:
● Students will demonstrate progress in identifying theme.
● Students will be able to back up their answer using textual evidence from the text.
● Students will demonstrate their oral abilities when it comes to responding in discussions.

Formative & Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment: As mentioned earlier the learnings will be surrounded around theme and how to
identify it. The formative assessments that will occur will be in the forms of group and class discussions.
There will be times where the instructor will give examples and students must explain why they chose
their response.
Summative Assessment: The summative assessment will be completed by Friday which will be two activities
located in Google Classroom. This is an individual assignment which will be used to show if the students
understood how to identify a theme.
Differentiation, Modification(s), & Accommodation(s)
Differentiation: Some of the differentiation that occurs this week will come through the Carol Tomilson’s
Understanding Differentiated Instruction guide. Since the instructor bases most of his instructional time by
allowing students to be in groups, there are certain groups that are chosen based on their needs. These
groups receive special help in the forms of “small-group instruction”. They are given the instructions again
but in different wording and the instructor tends to spend a large portion of their time with a selected
number of students.
Modification: When it comes to modifications there are certain students that receive some flexibility in
their work when being graded. With that being said, that does not necessarily mean that they will have it
easy, but there are other things that are being looked for beyond what the assignment has. The lesson is
also made accessible for certain students.
Accomodation: Since this is a reading class, there are a select number of students who will have the text be
read to them as it will be a form of “auditory assistance”. The instructor will also give a certain group some
extended time to complete the assignments.

There are 6 students which receive DSE support along with additional support by the Special Education
teacher.

Instructional Strategies & Learning Tasks to Support Diverse Learners’ Needs

Introduction or Student Spark ( 15 minutes)
1) After the students have settled down into class, there will be a small ice breaker on how they spent there
day yesterday and what they are looking for in the weekend
2) Once this is complete students will be told that today they will be watching an animation short which
will be used to discuss theme.

Body ( 35 minutes)
1) First and foremost, there will be a small explanation on what theme is and how to identify theme
2) It is very important to inform the students that theme is something that the author wants us to learn,
and it is not something that will be written in the text but rather in-between the lines
3) Since last week was spent learning about main idea, there will be a discussion on how main idea and
theme is different and how they are written.
4) There will be some examples that demonstrate how a main idea looks like in comparison to how a
theme looks like.
5) If students have no lingering questions, there will be a short clip that will be played to identify theme
6) The following video will be played: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQGuVKHtrxc [A Joy Story: Joy
and Heron]
7) After the video is complete, students will be asked to identify key aspects of the video, like the
characters and the main idea and finally the theme
8) Once the students demonstrated their ability to identify theme, they will move on to learning how to
identify theme in text
9) The instructor will inform the students of important points that they have to remember when looking
for theme in text such as the author will not state it, you must use context clues to identify it.
10) Once this information is said, there will be a class practice in which a text will be analyzed for the
theme
11) The text is as followed:
When Sam went out of town, he left his bird with his friend Dom. Dom was supposed to feed it and make
sure it got a chance to fly around every day. One day, Dom forgot that the bird was out of its cage and he
opened the front door. Sam’s bird flew away! Dom tried to find it, but he couldn’t. Dom apologized when
Same Came home. Sam was sad, but he knew it was an accident and wasn’t mad.
12) After this practice students will be working as a group to complete an assignment which will
demonstrate their ability to know theme.
13) During this time, the students and instructor will do what they usually do. If they seek help, they can
always get a hold of the instructor using the “Ask For Help” feature

Closure ( 5 minutes)
1) Once there is 5 minutes remaining in class, they wil be brought back to the main session where the
instructor will check the progress of the students
2) For those who haven’t finished it they are instructed to try their best to finish it by tomorrow so we can
go over it as a class

Facilitation & Safety

Burgess-Peterson Academy will be remaining online so these facilitation and safety rules will be protean to
an online environment. First and foremost, students are required to always have their camera’s on, unless
instructed not to or given special permission by instructor. This is also done for the safety of the students
as their well-being can be monitored as well. Students are asked to refrain from doing “non-school” related
activities during Zoom classes. Students are also asked to be on time and remain in the Zoom class until
dismissed. When students are working in groups, they are instructed to use the “Raise Hand” Zoom feature,
in order to get the attention of an instructor. During Online Asynchronous the students will be able to
receive help from instructor as they will be able to get onto the Zoom session during school hours.

During “connections” students will be reminded that this is a safe space, and that students can express how
they are feeling weather that be positive or negative. They are reminded they can only communicate
through gestures or emojis that are provided on Zoom.

Layered Texts and Other Materials

Any assignments will be added to iCollege for your viewing.
REFERENCES
Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.
Scholastic.
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Improving Adolescent Literacy: Content Area Strategies at Work. Boston, MA: Pearson.
Tomlinson, C. (2018). Understanding Differentiated Instruction.
Practice One Comes From:
https://www.lcps.org/cms/lib/VA01000195/Centricity/Domain/3608/Daily%20Reading%20pages%201%20and%
202.pdf
Practice Two Comes From: https://app.quizalize.com/view/quiz/determining-theme-2-read-each-of-the-following-
fables-and-choose-the-correct-matching-theme-4c344ddd-2674-4389-b315-827f056a1f9f
https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/free-reading-worksheets/theme-worksheets/