Teacher Poll

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Theme Triangles

I recently used theme triangles (one of the methods discussed for colloboration in Deeper Reading) in my classroom to facilitate deeper levels of comprehension. The purpose of this activity is to get students to produce a relevant theme from a reading and then make connections to life and pop-culture. Using a posterboard, students complete the following task:
  1. Draw a triangle and place the name of their chosen story at the at the top of the triangle.
  2. Students then come up with a theme and write it down in the middle of the triangle.
  3. On the right hand side of the triangle, students explain how this theme can be applied to life and give specific examples.
  4. On the left hand side of the triangle, students relate the theme to a popular movie, book, song, or poem that has the same theme.

It is a very good activity to show students how readings are prevelant to their lives.

Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. amy_dilmarFebruary 8, 2010 at 2:22 PM

    I agree, making the connections to their lives is great because psych research demonstrates how this type of activity creates long term memory. I also think that sometimes as high school teachers we might undervalue a technique such as this one. Probably because in the mind of the teacher the students are more mature than what they really are...I know that I have found that activities where the students have to visually organize simple information excites the students beyond my belief.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)