Literacy Groups Idea: Author's Message Bookmarks (Author's Theme)

This is a simple quick idea to use for a reading rotation activity which will help your students to read with the author's message or theme in mind.

This product contains:
-24 high quality bookmarks that you can print and laminate to add to your reading group resources (4 are blank for student's own interpretation of the author's message/theme).

Throughout narratives, there are often themes where the author either intentionally or unintentionally conveys messages to the reader. A theme is usually a message that you can apply to your own life. There may even be multiple themes within a story.

Examining the theme helps when discussing the main idea or summarising a story and uses higher order reading skills such as interpretation and reflection where students have to find the evidence within the text to stake their claim.

Common themes in literature are: friendship, courage, perseverance, honesty, kindness, loyalty.

I used this idea with Year 3 (Australia) toward the end of the year when we had done a lot of work on higher order reading skills already. It is probably best suited for middle primary/elementary grades due to the need to gather textual evidence to prove their choice of theme. Children love being reading detectives to root out all the clues to support their opinion on the theme/message of the story.

Reading can be fun and engaging with my author's message/theme bookmarks!