I LOVE units and themes, but I always seem to get distracted or just can't seem to pull it all together to make sense. The only successful theme we have had thus far was our Valentine's unit.
[these pictures were taken with my cell phone back when it was the only handy camera I had, I apologize in advance]
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| Cutting strips of paper into tiny pieces to glue onto a heart. |
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| Our sensory bin with a plastic sorter and a vellum take out box. |
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| Inside the bin: glitter pom poms, wooden hearts, plastic heart beads. |
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| The wooden hearts were great for sorting, stacking and size grading. |
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| Azzy painted this poster using texture tools and cookie cutters, then I wrote the scripture (while kids ran around my legs). |
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| A fun counting game! Match the letter with the correct number of stamps to the mailbox with the number on it. |
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| We used heart beads as reusable stamps and the little birds had to fly the letter to the correct mailbox. |
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| A matching game. |
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| Another matching game. |
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| Another matching game (Monkey was really into matching games). |
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| A race to the finish game. |
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| Measuring bears with sweethearts. |
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| Organizing hearts |
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| Tic tac toe |
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| Graphing with sweethearts |
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| Dominoes |
Printables from:
I'm hoping to have more themes like this to go along with what we are learning. I think my main problem with themes is that I haven't been able to find what I'm wanting to do to correlate with what we are learning. So, I have been doing a lot of research and have come up with a plan of action. I'm going to pick a theme that goes with our curriculum lessons and focus on that theme for the duration of the unit. Since we are going through Weaver Interlock, our units focus on Creation and the Flood. Our themes will go along with those units.
Here is what I have planned thus far.
[We already did Unit one, which was the trinity. Unit two starts with Day one of creation.]
Unit two (two weeks): God made light
Theme: Light
Unit three (one week): God made air and water
Theme: Weather
Unit four (six weeks): God made dry land and plants
Theme: Gardening
Unit five (seven weeks): God made the universe
Theme: Solar system
Unit six (four weeks): God made birds and fish
Theme: Birds, fish
Unit seven (nine weeks): God made animals and people
Theme: Mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, dinosaurs, the human body(anatomy based)-two weeks, babies(development, growth, care)-two weeks
Unit eight (one week): God rested on the seventh day
Theme: Sleep
Unit nine (five weeks): The fall and the flood
Theme: Obedience
I will be documenting our units and correlating themes on here so you can see how I'm pulling it all together, and what I'm using. Sometimes I may go shorter or longer with our units and themes, just depends on how quickly Monkey picks things up. I'm hoping to either have taught or be in the process of teaching unit seven and using the baby theme around the time that our next little one is due. Monkey loves learning about babies, we did some light learning activities before Froggy was born that he really enjoyed.
There are a few months with holidays that we will be focusing on as well, here are those holidays and themes.
November-Thankfulness
December- Advent
February- Love (God loved us first)
We have so many activities we do with Weaver and FIAR that I don't see the need to have any major themes. When I start more school time activities with Froggy, that will change because I like to have lots of fun themes for preschool since I use a conglomeration of different free preschool resources, I use the themes to pull everything together. I'm really hoping that this will help me to stay focused, since these themes correlate so closely to our units.
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