Lesson 3: Thematic Springboards Part I: Subject Unit Study Ideas
3-2 Language Arts
You've probably found yourself at this point. You and your seven-year-old are together enjoying a classic book like, say, Katy and the Big Snow. It brings to mind a poem . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Snow-Storm", for example. You recall your own mother talking about the big storm of ‘62 that buried the car and half the house. Perhaps you have a favorite snow day activity: popping corn, making a snowman, or snow angels.
You have the first thoughts for building a study based on a book. This is one of the most popular types of unit studies: the literature-based unit study. Here you start with a book or collection of books on a theme and build other activities around it drawing on as many other subjects as you care to incorporate. If you've ever watched Reading Rainbow on the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) you've seen a good model for such a study. In fact, we've used several episodes of the series as resources for studies of our own.
You may want to start with a thematic list of books like Scholastic's Every Teacher's Thematic Booklist. Your library will likely have several, not to mention just looking up the subject in the card catalogue. Doing an online search will yield a ton of references. I often find it helpful to search by theme at a booksite like http://BarnesandNoble.com. Pick out several books and make them available for your children in a pretty display to entice young readers to dive deeper into your theme. When we set up a study based on Katy, I devised a simple set of display panels which Jenny and I decorated for the snow study. We covered them in a wintery blue fabric. The computer helped us print out bold titles for the sections of the display – suitable for coloring. I copied pages from a teacher's magazine on snow studies, work sheets from an educational activities book, and for a penmanship exercise Jenny copied a snow poem from a book of poetry. Nowadays we'd probably search a favorite Internet spot for poetry and other related literature like The University of Virginia's E-text library or americanpoems.com .
For spelling and vocabulary words I pulled many out of the books and research material, adding to these from a brainstorming session Jenny and I had during the study. The words became a handwriting project as she copied them into paper snowflakes copied from a magazine to cut out and tack up on our display panels. By the way, we frequently plugged vocabulary words into a simple but fun shareware program we once had for the computer. There are many programs and devices to help you find a way to add pizzazz to this often humdrum activity. But there was so much more beyond language arts to help whip up a storm for our snow study.
For a science project we studied about how snowflakes are formed. Even the weather cooperated with a convenient snowstorm delivering exquisite samples for closer scrutiny under magnifying glass. A science book on snow gave us some amazing background facts as well.
For a touch of social studies, we used a world almanac to compare average snowfalls in various parts of the world, adding a map to our display with signs posting greatest recorded snowfalls over the locations of some of the snowiest places in world. And even though it was a few years advanced for my daughter, we borrowed the Little House series book, The Long Winter from the library from which I read excerpts about a most dangerous winter of storms for the pioneers in the Dakotas. Since we live in the north woods we even reviewed snowstorm safety procedures provided in a local newspaper. The unit study sort of ambled over the schoolroom all winter. The display panels – which served as a room divider in our "basement schoolhouse" – were added to all winter long as we discovered more and more appropriate material and snow-based work to our curriculum.
In those days (pre-Internet) I relied heavily on an old copier. A few great snowflake images from a teaching magazine found their way onto many a worksheet to stamp the season-long study onto math problem sheets, spelling quizzes, etc. In geography we skipped around a social studies textbook, which we followed sporadically, so we could cover the colder countries to dovetail with the study. It was also the year of great political upheaval in the former Soviet Union so that became the "teachable moment" for our most in-depth study of that country for current events, government, and history. When it collapsed into multiple countries we added mapmaking to our unit - another serendipitous tangent.
So what started out as a short and simple snow unit study stormed onto our winter scene, driving many explorations into virtually every subject.
