This theme deals with students' names, their appearance, their ages and birthdates, their feelings about school, their families, their homes, their bodies, what they can do with their bodies, and what their five senses teach them about their environment, especially how eyes see color, size, shape and location. It concludes with a Five Senses Day where children celebrate their own bodies.
During this theme children can play with their names, graph people in their families, graph color of eyes, etc., experiment with sounds, taste a variety of foods, smell familiar and unfamiliar scents, investigate color - including skin color, play touch games using a variety of objects, make face masks, draw portraits of each other, measure body parts, listen, read, write and discuss good literature on the topic, tour the school and playground, watch a person signing - sign language, listen to music from different cultures, make sign language posters, pop popcorn and use all five senses on popcorn, make jello parfait using different colored layers.
This theme begins with a nature walk using all our five senses. Children would be looking for seasonal changes and collecting natural treasures. This would lead to comparing living and non-living things. Children would brainstorm all the living and non-living things they could think of and these would be added to a web and sorted into categories. This theme could include harvest and harvesting celebrations such as Thanksgiving, Halloween, and other cultural celebrations. It could include plants and trees in autumn, making bread from wheat, safety in the forest, the study of pumpkins, forest animals, zoo animals, endangered species, pets, care of animals.
Some activities children would be involved in would be singing and reading harvest songs, making up own songs, reading and dramatizing Little Red Hen, baking bread and comparing bread in different cultures, print-making with fruits and vegetables, adopting trees in the schoolyard, visiting a pumpkin farm, working in cooperative groups to make animal facts books, comparing animals from different parts of the world, discussing keeping zoo animals in cages, graphing our pets, visiting Wildlife Refuge places, planning a pet show, setting up a pet store, using animal puppets, discussing how the wolf has been stereotyped in literature, planning to buy and make vegetable or stone soup, visiting a pet store, observing and caring for a classroom pet, having a Salute to Animals day where children could bring stuffed animals and do a variety of activities with them.
Activities children would engage in might include: creating maps of our community, taking neighbourhood walks to observe and map our community and see workers in action, labelling parts of a home, drawing different kinds of homes, creating a model community from boxes, practising good telephone manners, creating a class phone book on the computer, mailing letters at a play post office, designing our own stamps, walking to mail letters to friends at a real post office, visiting a fire station, checking our homes and schools for fire safety, inviting a police officer or health nurse to talk to us, visiting a dentist or veterinarian's office, making toothbrushing charts, labelling parts of our bodies, making medical books, doing charcoal action poses of people in our community, writing thank you letters to our visitors or hosts, finding out what our parents do in the community, setting up a classroom bank, hospital, etc..
This theme would end with our own Busy Town Day. Our classroom would become a town with all the children taking worker roles and parents coming in to be our customers.