This document discusses a project between UC Irvine and Santa Ana Unified School District that aims to help students develop academic literacy skills. It does this by providing explicit instruction on reading strategies like tapping prior knowledge, visualizing, and monitoring comprehension. Teachers model these strategies by reading texts aloud and having students discuss themes. Students learn to distinguish between topics and themes, analyze characters, and write analytical essays on themes. Assessment involves a pretest and posttest on theme analysis, and color-coding and revising their own essays. The goal is to improve students' ability to interpret themes and write effective analytical essays.