Curricular Conversations - Softcover

Kucer, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571100164 ISBN 13: 9781571100160

Publisher: Routledge, 1995

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.

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About the Author:

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.

Review:

One of the professional books that stood out from the rest is Curricular Conversations: Themes in Multilingual and Monolingual Classrooms by Stephen B. Kucer, Cecilia Silva, and Esther L. Delgado-Larocco. This is an excellent resource for preservice teachers, as well as for any elementary teacher who wants to integrate themes within the classroom.

Curricular Conversations helps teachers develop a framework for building and implementing a thematic curriculum. It launches the reader into the world of thematic planning by showing how to select themes and materials, generate thematic thinking, select and manage thematic activities, and, finally, evaluate the thematic instruction and learning. Curricular Conversations goes a step further by highlighting the needs of the second language learner. This makes it a wonderful aid for teachers struggling to meet the educational needs of these children. An excellent feature of the book is its presentation of the perspectives of two very different urban bilingual third grade classroom. -- Language Arts, November, 1996

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