“How do I pick a theme that all my students can get involved in?” “Teaching with themes doesn't work. I can never get the kids beyond the level of skills work.” “I have ESL students who understand content areas conceptually in their native language, but find it hard to express their ideas in English. If I could help them put it all together, they'll be more successful.”
If this sounds familiar to you, you'll welcome this concise and helpful book on the “whys” and “hows” of building and implementing a thematically unified curriculum.
The twenty-nine themes outlined in Curricular Conversations cover all sorts of interests and subject matters. These themes are not presented as prepackaged activity sets but in a framework with outlines of strategies and techniques.
By combining the theory and application of teaching with themes, Curricular Conversations:
- helps teachers and students to move beyond skills and facts to higher-level thinking processes;
- demonstrates how the themes work in real life;
- shows teachers and students how to generate their own thematic units;
- includes a bibliography of more than 1,000 children's books in English and Spanish and from various cultural backgrounds;
- gives teachers support material in an appendix full of sample forms and charts for organizing and managing class discussions and investigations.
The key word here is “conversations.” The authors feel that all students-whatever their abilities, languages, or literacy levels may be-should be able to join in and be engaged by the conversations about so many interesting things that a theme holds.
The authors of Curricular Conversations have been involved in all dimensions of thematic teaching and learning for the past twenty years. They share extensive experience teaching in primary and intermediate classrooms in urban, suburban, and rural schools, and have worked with monolingual and bilingual students. In their university faculty roles, their efforts have been focused on developing thematic curriculums, and they have carried this over in their consultation with classroom teachers and school administrators.
Stephen B. Kucer is an Associate Professor at Fordham University-Lincoln Center. Cecilia Silva teaches bilingual education at Texas Christian University. Esther L. Delgado-Larocco is on the faculty of the Center for Bilingual/Multicultural Studies in Education at California State University at Chico.
