What is theme teaching?
Theme teaching is a method of teaching concepts and skills through activities that revolve around topics that are naturally exciting to kids, like dinosaurs or transportation, as well as topics that are important for kids like health or safety that can also be made exciting through creative lesson planning. Theme teaching is a successful and popular teaching method primarily used in preschools. Integrated learning is a similar teaching concept successfully used in older grades that entails incorporating lessons from many areas of the curriculum including math, science, history, art and language arts as varied topics such as Ancient Egypt or The Water Cycle are being covered.
This article will focus on successfully using theme teaching with preschool age students, but readers will easily see how the basic concepts can be used to stimulate ideas for integrated learning with older learners in a classroom or home school learning environment as well.
Creating Successful Theme Teaching Preschool Lesson Plans
To create a successful theme learning experience for preschoolers, teachers must first be aware of both the skills and concepts that their students need to master. Examples of concepts may include shapes, colors, numbers, letters or opposites. Examples of skills may include holding and using a pencil, using scissors, running, jumping, buttoning a jacket, listening or introducing themselves. These are only a few examples of skills and concepts that may be appropriate for preschoolers.
As you can see, concepts often involve cognitive development while skills often involve fine motor (using fingers and hand-eye coordination), gross motor (using arms and legs), or communication skills (both verbal and physical). Language incorporates both concepts and skills as children learn both receptive language (what they understand) and expressive language (what they can communicate). Successful theme teaching will incorporate activities to encourage all needed concepts and skills regardless of the theme.
Benefits of Theme Teaching
There are many benefits to theme teaching for both children and teachers. For teachers, planning preschool lesson plans around a theme allows for more efficient collection and use of related materials. Preschoolers benefit from theme teaching as they receive a saturation of knowledge on a given topic or theme and it is presented in a variety of ways over time. This is particularly important as teachers address a variety of learning styles, including auditory, visual or tactile. In a theme teaching environment, kids will hear it, see it, touch it and do it. Theme teaching is a great way to build vocabulary as kids build categories. What does this mean? Once young learners become thoroughly aware of the basic facts of a category such as flowers, they can more easily distinguish between and learn proper names such as violet or tulip.
In a theme teaching curriculum, students will not only read about flowers petals and look at pictures of them, they will touch them, smell them, count them, sing about them, cut them out of paper, color them and dress up in them, for just a few examples.
A Common Mistake in Theme Teaching Preschool Lesson Plans
One mistake I have often seen with preschools attempting theme teaching is to make try to turn a concept into a theme. An example of this is when preschools present shapes or colors as a theme. This is by no means a detrimental or damaging mistake. Rather it is just an idea that loses the benefits of theme teaching. Instead of making shapes or colors a theme, in theme teaching shapes and colors are a concepts that should be taught within a theme. Here are some examples. If your theme is sports, what shape is ball, a baseball field or a pool? What color is a local team jersey, a basketball or soccer ball? If your theme is spring, what shape is the sun or a kite? What color is caterpillar or a cloud? The whole point of theme teaching is that skills and concepts aren’t taught in isolation or without purpose. Imagine cutting along lines for no reason at all, in an effort that will probably be thrown away verses cutting along lines to create a keepsake American flag.
An Example of Using Theme Teaching for Preschool Lesson Plans
One great example of a learning theme is animals. Children are already familiar with and attracted to the idea. While many preschools and home day cares use a weekly theme, in my experience the most successful use a monthly theme broken down into weekly parts. The example of an animal theme is easy to break down into farm animals, jungle animals, sea animals and forest animals.
Now teachers need to go back to their list of the concepts and skills they want to address. Here are a few examples to show you how you can incorporate those concepts and skills, into an animal theme and hopefully will inspire you to see that skills and concepts can be incorporated into any theme.
Some are so obvious. If you are working on counting, how many legs does a duck, or horse or octopus have? If you are working on colors, what color is a blue jay or a cardinal or tiger or an elephant? If you are teaching opposites, ask which is larger a squirrel or a bear? A whale or a clown fish? Teaching concepts like these often comes naturally.
Sometimes finding ways to incorporate skills is more challenging. Need to work on cutting skills? How about fringing a lion’s mane or a horse’s tail? Need to work on expressive language skills? How about puppet shows where kids introduce their animal? Need to work on self help skills like dressing? Collect animal costumes and let kids practice zipping and buttoning. Need to work on measuring skills? Use animal shaped cookie cutters to make cookies. Need to build gross motor skills? Play Simon Says and tiptoe like a cat, run like a tiger, swim like a beaver and so on. Need to work on prewriting skills? Draw animals with side walk chalk.
Successful theme teaching preschool lesson plans will include theme related books, games, art activities, center activities, guest speakers or field trips and even snacks that relate to the theme. A theme teaching curriculum will saturate kids with vocabulary and concepts related to the theme and allow kids to explore the theme while practicing a variety of important skills. Theme teaching is inspiring for teachers and learners. Learning should be both fun and challenging and theme teaching is a great way to offer both to young learners.
