I'd like to go a step above our home school curriculum and do a theme of the week/month. I've seen a TON of books that I could buy that would give me the ideas (I'm not very good at coming up with so many crafty things on my own), but in order to buy these books, I need to dish out a ton of money. Does anybody know of a website that would have ideas for free? I've been looking, but can't seem to find anything. I would appreciate some help searching.
I do this sometimes. This week we did the solar system and next week it will be butterflies and mohs. I really try to keep themes relevant to what the kids are into. Last week my son mentioned that he wanted to rename the planets with Star Wars planet names and my daughter was describing the solar system her dragon-planet existed in. Ahem. So I thought this week we'd spend some time on the solar system. I just googled stuff like "solar system worksheet", "solar system crafts", "planet activity" and such. An hour or so later I had about a half dozen things lined up. I generally try to find an arty craft, some sort of experiment or model, maybe some related poetry or articles, videos and some colouring and worksheets. Then we spend a couple of afternoons doing the stuff.
There is a wonderful yahoo group that does a them of the week. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lessonthemeoftheweek/ She sends out the week's them and 10 - 20 links & activities that go with the link. There is a site with all of the past weeks themes too. It has been a great resource for us.
We do a theme every two weeks. We are currently finishing H is for Home theme (learning about how a home is built, types of homes in different countries). I included the story of the three little pigs for my 3 year old as one of our books to read. This week we are learning about Animal Homes. I use books from the library so it is free for us. I break subjects for a unit this way Language Arts - to include the books we are reading, phonics and language arts activities and games related to the book and/or theme. Math activities - to include file folder games, math games I make, and workbooks that we are using. Science - a science activity that covers observation, prediction, experiment and conclusion. We do preschool sceince activities with my toddler too! Social Studies - includes reading about different cultures, countries, customs, holidays, our community, etc (relating to the theme if possible) Sometimes we do hands on craft activities such as building model houses of straw and sticks, making a teepee, and visiting museums. Arts and Crafts - projects we can do together or the children can do seperately. For example: When we did a Fish/Ocean theme in May, the boys made coffee filter jellyfish and we made a Tissue paper Rainbow Fish from a paper plate. We just started including Lapbooks in our unit studies. There are many yahoo groups and cafemom groups for theme unit studies. You can get alot of ideas from bloggers too!
abcteach has themes monthly , when my kids were grade schoolers we would go through thier themes, I adjusted for older kids, to do extras that way
I forgot about abcteach, thanks for reminding me. And thanks for the Yahoo group, I have requested to join!
We do monthly geography assignments, we research the history, geography, culture and even what they grow. We also incorporate a little home ec in it and make a whole meal consisting of recipes from different regions of that country. This year only my 7th grader will be doing this.
We did a small thing on chopsticks the other day - LOL..... I made everyone at least TRY and eat dinner with chopsticks (I had actually ordered some for my hair and then extra cool looking ones to eat with and to do dd's hair) and we learned why they don't use knives etc.
We have studied out holidays per month before so each months theme was the holidy of the month... do you know there are very few months that DO not have official holidays? Anyway we did those one year because in 13 years you run out of themes! HA!
We have been doing themes, but mostly I do it based on DS's interests that week/month. A couple of weeks ago, he was extremely interested in learning about animal homes (mostly b/c of an ant hill in the front yard) and learning about who lives where. So, I ran with it! I downloaded a ton of stuff from Enchanted Learning, KidsSoup, ABCTeach, and more and we had a blast. I found a bunch of books at the library and *I* even learned some new things!! If I can't find anything specific on my normal 'sites' that I visit, then I will just Google "Animal Homes Unit Study" or something like that and will find TONS of great sites that way. One thing that's been a TREMENDOUS help for me to stay organized with sites is EverNote. It lets you "clip" parts of the website (or all of it if you desire) and you can add tags and organize them into folders as well. It's great for when you run across something and want to bookmark it, but always forget about it later! I have stopped bookmarking stuff and just clip it to EverNote instead! Thank you for the Yahoo group link! I am always looking for new ideas!!
