Writing your own Yearly Theme?

[Pammie]

Does anyone use a yearly "theme" to tie in all of your curriculum plans for your dc?

I write my own curriculum for my dc, and have for years, but I need help finding a "theme" that I can use all year long. Last year I used "Mother Goose" and tied all of our curriculum activities to a different Mother Goose Rhyme each week. This school year I've just used a "literacy"theme, with all of our activities branching off of the "book of the week". It worked well, but I missed the cohesiveness of having everything tie-in together like the Mother Goose. Any ideas??

I've done the weekly/monthly seasonal themes before, and they've been okay but building on learning week-to-week seems a little disjointed. The kids got SO much out of the year-long-curriculum-theme, I'd like to do another one for next school year, I'm just drawing a blank!

[kidkair]

Maybe something about the biomes of the world. You can match the biomes to the seasons like doing Tundra in winter and Desert in summer. You can also match countries to each biome and talk about the differences in culture and food across the world. You could find little stories or poems from each country or biome for each week. When I did this with my group they really enjoyed the animals and plants from each biome.

[SilverSabre25]

You could do "change" and do an in-dpeth study of the changes of the seasons, the changes of them as they grow, animals as they change through the year, etc.

You could do a year of culture studies and study a different country each month, learning about their food, dress, lifestyle, etc.

Instead of weekly, you could do monthly themes, or bi-monthly, or quarterly themes. That way the learning would be stretched out and less disjointed.

[daycare]

I subscribe to a lot of books and it seems to me that All of them tend to follow the seasons as to how they are written.

back to school, apples, then fall themes, autumn, winter, spring, etc.

I tend to follow this through out the year and also am writing my own for the upcomming year.......actually I am trying to get my summer done right now... then Ill write the rest later...