Teaching Kindergarten with Themes

One of the best things about Kindergarten is we use themes to teach.  When I first started teaching Kindergarten, we had a theme every week!  We had  a theme that we tried to fit in every book, paper, a letter, and art project into.  It was crazy!  We used to joke about having to finish up one theme while starting the next one (So, children, there were spiders on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims).

We hate to give anything up but I cannot teach one thing each week.  I have lots of books that do not fit into a theme.  Many of the art projects and math papers were not appropriate for the skill levels for that time of the year (but they fit the theme!!).


Flash forward a few years.  Themes are even easier now. There are so many cute units available to buy or find for free on the internet now!  It is overwhelming!  How do you decide what to focus on?  Do you need new stations every week or every other week?  Who is going to pay for all that ink and cardstock???!!?



Ha!


So, we have tried to make our lives a little simpler.  I use Daily Five for my reading instruction.  The kids read books that are on their level, write on their own level, listen to fluent reading in great storybooks, read with a buddy, and learn their letters and words through Word Work centers that I try to keep simple enough for them to understand and do without adult help.  I no longer worry that they are working on theme related centers (although I stick them in occasionally!).

I use a similar system for math.  I set up sixteen centers based on the objectives we are working on that quarter.  We started Common Core last year. I completely differentiated my centers the fourth quarter to better meet the needs of that class.

I am trying to differentiate more this year.  Some of the centers are cute and based on favorite books (like Pete the Cat and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom! in the beginning of the year) but most are dice or spinners or other manipulatives and a recording sheet.  I am not sure that kids notice the cute clipart as much as we do!  I will write another post about math centers and differentiation but I also greatly admire Marsha from A Differentiated Kindergarten.   You should check out her math centers for the beginning of school.

Wow!

What a long explanation of teaching with/without themes.

Now I do try to incorporate my science and social studies themes into my read alouds, shared writing, and art projects.  For example, our first social studies theme is Home and School.  We will spend some of our first nine weeks on this theme.

I am wondering if the Common Core Social Studies goals will be anything like these:


UNIT 1:  Home and School
Goal 1. Political Science - Students will understand the historical development and current 
status of the democratic principles and the development of skills and attitudes 
necessary to become responsible citizens.
Objectives – The student will be able to:
a. Identify reasons for classroom and school rules, such as maintaining order and 
keeping the community safe. 
b. Recognize rules help promote fairness, responsible behavior, and privacy. 
c. Describe the roles, rights, and responsibilities of family members.  
d. Describe the roles of members of the school, such as principal, crossing guard, bus 
drivers, and teachers. 
e. Identify and describe rights, and responsibilities in the classroom and family. 
Goal 2:  Peoples of the Nation and the World - Students will understand how people in 
Maryland, the United States, and around the world are alike and different.
Objectives – The student will be able to:
a. Give examples of qualities, such as customs, interests, skills, and experiences that 
make individuals and families in their immediate environment unique.
b. Demonstrate how groups of people interact.
c. Identify, discuss, and demonstrate appropriate social skills, such as listening to the 
speaker, taking turns, settling disagreements, and reaching compromise at home and 
in school. 
Goal 3:  Geography - Students will use geographic concepts and processes to understand 
location and its relationship to human activities.
Objectives – The student will be able to:
a. Identify situations where people make choices. 
b. Recognize workers as human resources. 
Goal 4: History - Students will use historical thinking skills to understand how individuals 
and events have changed society over time.
Objectives – The student will be able to:
a. Identify and describe events of the day in chronological order. 
b. Describe daily events in terms of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 

It is a little overwhelming!  These are our objectives for one subject for one quarter (to be integrated into our language arts block).  If you look it over, you will see many ideas that we have traditionally covered in Kindergarten: school rules, families, working as a group, showing the day in sequence, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.   We learn about geography and history (Columbus, the Pilgrims) Some of the others are a little...um...more..... difficult? (Um, we are supposed to tell them workers are human resources.  Oh!  Community helpers!  That makes sense, I guess.)

  We do the best we can.  (Most of my kids will never see a crossing guard.)  :)

We will be using these themes this year :

September Friendship, Rules, Apples (got to slip that in there!)
October Bats, Spiders, Pumpkins (and Columbus and oh!  Fire Safety!)
November Fall and The First Thanksgiving
December Gingerbread and Celebrations
January Winter, MLK, Peace
February Groundhog's Day, Valentine's Day, President's Day, Dental Health (I know!!  too much for such a short month.  But it isn't like we can move any of the days around!)
March St. Patrick's, Rainbows
April Frogs, Spring
May Bugs, Pond


I still feel like some months are crazy!  Especially October and February.  And we fit in our science and social studies into these themes the best we can.

So, is anyone still with me?  Do you do any of this?  Do you celebrate as you go through the year?

How Do You Plan?

Jessica Standford is having a giveaway for a gift certificate to Erin Condren for those who blog about how they plan.


First of all, I know we are very lucky.  No one comes in to look at my plans: they are actually just for me!  I can write them in any form and with as much detail as I want.  I can do them weeks in advance or (shh!) write something down after it has already occurred (really, this never, um, seldom happens to me!)

I actually have plans written up for the first six weeks of school on my website (on the sidebar).  I share them with my team and they do whatever they want with them.  We all teach differently, we have different kids, and we go forward at different paces but it is nice to have some common goals.  I didn't make up these plans-we have been teaching together for a long time and we planned most of them together (but I did type them.  Ta Da!).

Every year, I dust them off over the summer and redo them a little.  I add in the fun new things I have found, take out what doesn't work anymore, and try to wrap my mind around our new schedule (we get a new schedule every year.  I am not kidding.  We have lunch at a new time every year.  Just in case we were getting bored, I guess.)

I plan math by quarter (like many of you, we adopted the new Common Core standards last year so all our math planning changed).  Our county gives us Investigations and we use some of their activities and some of our own in our math tubs.  We found the pace was a little slow for our kids (and us!) so we modified.  We decide on 16 or so math tubs for the quarter and fill them up all at once at the beginning of the quarter.  Then I plan large group activities that will meet the standards and what resources we have, then I fill those in my plan book weekly, based on my kids' needs.  Lots of books and games and hands on activities.  Fun.

I use Daily Five for reading.  After I get the workshops up and running (in October sometime), I plan the strategy/guided reading groups based on my assessments (endless).  I do not write out a new plan for each group every day.  I know the standards I want each group to meet (say learn word families or beginning sounds) and I just write that.

My reading groups follow a similar format each time.  I meet with the kids, we read and discuss a small book (or two).  With my higher groups, once a week they do a written follow up to reading (like a sentence about the problem/solution) or we write sentences on the white boards (for some reason, they love this!)

  I dictate a sentence, they write it, then they give themselves a star for using correct punctuation, spelling, and upper/lowercase letters.  They get to draw stars on the whiteboards. Amazing!  Wow!  Then they erase and we do another one.  I would like to believe that I am instilling these higher skills in my kids but as all teachers know, what they do with my prompting and what they do by themselves are two different things!  Also, one word of caution, if the sentence or the words get too hard for their level, they lose all of the nice conventions.  When they are struggling, very little will remain of the upper/lower, periods, etc.  Always a good lesson for me to find their Proximal Zone, right?  hehe

We integrate Science and Social Studies (yay!  Just like Common Core says to!  Yay again!  It is also what our county says to do so we are golden! )
Remember Themes?  From when you went to college and they told you to teach themes?
Well, we do.
Sort of.
We use our science and social studies for our themes some of the time.
Friendship (check)
Weather (check)
Famous Americans (check)
Living things (check)

See, it works.

(Um, don't look at our theme of Halloween, okay?)
So not all of the themes are related to Sci/SS.  But we try.

So we read books, make charts, have art projects (gasp), sing songs, write class books, etc. about our themes.  Love Kindergarten!!!!

Whole child learning!!!

So, most of that is sketched out and we fill it in weekly.
Except I keep looking at blogs and finding more stuff to do and no one wants to stop doing the olds stuff and we end up trying to do too much.  sigh.  It is all a balancing act, isn't it?

Check out how other people plan at Mrs. Stanford's blog.

And don't forget to enter the Pete the Cat giveaway!