During the month of January my classroom has been exploring one theme, Transportation! In case you are unsure of what a theme is let me explain it.. A theme is an idea or topic that a teacher and children can explore in many different ways. Generally teachers will integrate literacy, science, social studies, math, music, and art. Also, children should be involved in the planning stages. All of the above mentioned has taken place in my classroom. When we began this theme the main focus was airplanes. We started off by watching a video tour of an airplane. After watching the video the children and I worked together on the smart board to make a web. We talked about what jobs we would need for our airplane and what we would need our airplane to have. This web then fueled our construction of our Pretend center. With the help of the children we created an airplane. Our jobs were flight attendant, ticket taker, pilot, and passenger. The children helped make props for the pretend center as well. The children made seat belts, clouds for our sky, tickets for the passengers, and signs for our airplane. After our pretend center was created it was time to incorporate our theme into the other centers as well. After having read many books about airports we encouraged the children to build control towers and hangars in the Block center. We even went as far as to put pictures on the SmartBoard of control towers and hangars to help them visualize what they were building. In Art we made various airplane crafts and then moved onto trains and hot air balloons. In Discovery for the first 2 weeks of our transportation theme we had water and boats in our sensory table. Since then we have added sand and vehicle sand toys. In our library center we have done a lot to incorporate transportation. We have added transportation books, transportation puzzles, and transportation games. The SmartBoard is also part of our Library center and the children have been playing an interactive train game in which they have to build a train track. Each and every day we do a 20 minute small group lesson as well. We have incorporated math into our theme by graphing our favorite mode of transportation to an airplane hangar game involving number recognition. We have incorporated science into our theme by making boats out of aluminum foil and guessing how many counter bears our boats will hold. We then tested our hypothesis by floating our boats in water. Our ABC Music & Me program this month has fit into our theme as well as it is called "Things that Go." As you can see we have explored our transportation theme thoroughly and the children have been very successful! I love a theme based classroom because it ensures that the children are learning through play and through active exploration of their environment! Play Strong!