In creating your own thematic study, it is important to understand the type of process that will help you to develop your theme. It will take some time looking through children’s books to develop a theme to use with your five lessons, and the only way you will be able to do this is to spend time with texts. To simulate this process as a practice before you begin your own signature assignment, choose one of the five digital text sets that have been created for you and “read” the texts.
Instructions
Review the following document and select one of the five digital text sets for this assignment:
Lit 467 Thematic Digital Text Sets
As you work through the books in this simulation, take some notes about the texts and what stands out to you as important messages from the selected children’s literature. Look for a prominent theme that develops through the texts. Each person that encounters a text can interpret it many ways. As such, there will not be a simply right or wrong answer for your theme. So long as you can determine the common theme clearly, and defend it, much like your theme statement in your literary analysis papers, and write it as a proper theme statement (not a topic), you will be on the right track.
Determine the 5 books from your text set that most clearly communicate a common message. List the five texts you have chosen, the theme statement that you have developed through reading the texts, and the reason you felt the books connected thematically in that way.
Consider that these books are just a sample of the quality children’s literature available to you, both online and at libraries.
As such, your own thematic unit should incorporate no more than one or two of the books from these lists. Use these titles as branching off points to find your own quality literature to use with your own signature assignment
