In this post I'm going to walk you through how I structured our thematic units in my bilingual Kindergarten classroom. I'll describe how I organized our life cycles unit, but keep in mind that this can be done with any science or social studies unit.
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In my classroom, 90% of teaching and learning happened in Spanish, and 10% happened in English. I taught science or social studies during that 10% English time slot (sometimes it became more like 15%, depending upon what activity we were doing). I elected to teach science and social studies in English because I felt that it was a great opportunity to develop students' academic language and teach a ton of vocabulary. Plus, science and social studies can be taught in a very "hands on" manner, so this made concepts easier for my students to understand (even those who spoke very little English).
To begin planning a unit, I started with the general standards and content of what I wanted to teach. I would then try to think of some overarching question that we would explore. In the case of the life cycles unit, our guiding question was: "How do living things grow and change during their life cycles?"
In addition to coming up with a guiding question, I also planned some kind of authentic project for the end of the unit. The last year I taught the life cycles unit, I had kids work with a partner to create a project about the life cycle of one living thing. Then, we invited parents into the classroom and had a sort of science fair display.
With my goals in mind, I then designed learning activities for the unit. I planned for hands-on experiences to take place during our science/social studies block. I also planned to read aloud many texts on each life cycle we would study, to develop students' vocabulary and expose them multiple times to the same content.
Although all of that instruction would be taking place in English, I also planned to spend a little bit of time teaching life cycles in Spanish (as I did during all our content area units). My goal was twofold: First, I wanted to develop students' content area vocabulary and language in Spanish. Second, I also knew that learning about the concepts in Spanish would help my English science instruction make more sense to them.
What I didn't do is teach the same content or do the same activity in Spanish, and then do it in English. This is not an effective instructional practice, because kids will learn to just tune out one of the languages. Instead, I created a nonfiction reading unit and used readaloud texts in Spanish about the life cycles. So we were reading books about life cycles in Spanish during our literacy block, and then learning about the life cycles during our English science block, too.
Now that you know how I structured my instruction, it's time to move on to some more exciting stuff: the fun life cycle activities that were part of our unit!! Here are some of the things that we did (these activities can all be found in my life cycles unit, which I only have available in English at this time):
- I launched the unit by having kids each bring in a baby picture. I placed them randomly on tables and had them try to guess who each baby photo belonged to. The kids had so much fun with this!! After they looked at the photos, we then talked about how they had grown and changed since they were babies.
- The next day, I explained that living things grow and change during their life cycles. We read a book about living vs. nonliving, and completed this picture sort:
- After that, we moved on to studying the life cycle of a butterfly. I had ordered caterpillars, so we kept notes about their growth over time.
- Next up was learning about the frog life cycle. The picture below shows some vocabulary puzzles that the kids put together during centers. Another fun activity that they loved was modeling a tadpole's changes as it becomes a frog. They first made tadpoles with playdough, then added legs at the back, then the front, and got rid of the tail. As they were making the playdough frogs, they talked to a partner about each stage in the life cycle.
- After the frog life cycle, we studied the chicken life cycle. I also used this opportunity to teach about animals that are born from an egg vs. those that are born alive (oviparous vs. viviparous).
- Finally, during our last part of the unit, we studied plants. I purchased seeds and small planters, and the kids measured their plants every other day or so (math integration!). We also discussed why we need plants, and what we get from plants.
This unit lasted about 8 weeks in all - we did much more than I have time to describe here! I was able to teach just about every subject area through this unit, and the kids were super engaged. At the end of the unit, as I mentioned previously, the kids each selected a life cycle to teach about. They could choose to create Keynote presentations on the iPads, make posters, or use clay/other art supplies to represent the life cycle. The parents loved seeing their projects!!
I love being a reading specialist, but writing this post has made me really miss teaching these integrated thematic units! They were so effective in getting kids to learn content area material and vocabulary in both English and Spanish.
If you're interested in my life cycle unit, you can purchase it by clicking on the image below. Feel free to contact me here if you have any questions about it: http://learningattheprimarypond.com/contact/.
Happy teaching!
Alison
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