Exploring Theme With Stellarphant Text

This mini unit will explicitly step students through the skill of identifying and understanding the concept of theme in fiction texts. Students will explore character traits in comparison to character feelings, and develop their understanding of the difference between a story’s plot and theme. Students will ultimately be able to use themes from texts and apply them to real life, constructing a detailed and engaging explanation text. James Foley’s gorgeous text, ‘Stellarphant’ is used to inspire students’ thinking. While these lessons have been planned to be taught as a sequence, they can also run as standalone lessons, and will work with a range of mentor texts.