Theme-Sets For Secondary Students: How To Scaffold Core Literature

Theme-Sets for Secondary Students: How to Scaffold Core Literature

By combining best classroom practices with theme-sets, you surround canonical texts with supporting literature and inquiry-based instruction to help students formulate and answer questions about the central theme of a core novel. Theme-Sets for Secondary Students illustrates how theme-sets can turn traditional high school literature study into an engrossing collaborative exploration of topics such as:

• migrant families (Grapes of Wrath)
• the African American experience (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
• the literature of war (Night)
• the bullying mentality (Lord of the Flies, Great Expectations, and The Scarlet Letter)
• utopian/dystopian societies (Fahrenheit 451).

Theme-Sets for Secondary Students shows you how to choose fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and other genres for theme-sets. It offers ways to obtain the books for your theme sets at low cost, as well as ideas on planning theme-based instruction, differentiating instruction using theme-sets, and sparking inquiry in all adolescents-even disinterested and struggling students. The discussion of each core text is accompanied by book lists, teaching points, inquiry activities that integrate the theme-sets with the core text, and suggestions for evaluating how learners are doing.