Students in Mrs. Spizuco’s fourth grade class at Deauville Gardens East Elementary School are hard at work learning about theme, the central message or lesson of a story. Working collaboratively with partners, they read short task cards to practice identifying each story’s message. Students were challenged to go beyond simply naming the theme by justifying their thinking by citing explicit evidence from the text. This activity strengthened essential critical thinking skills by requiring the fourth graders to explain and support their interpretations. After completing all task cards, the class shared their ideas and engaged in discussions about how a single passage can contain more than one theme. They also discovered that the same theme could appear across multiple texts.