Unit Studies in our Classroom

Each month in our classroom, we study a new unit.  The unit study is an opportunity to go into depth about particular topics or interests that are relevant to children.  In September, we studied fruits and vegetables. This month we're studying transportation, and next month we'll study the human body.  With all units, we have object to object matching, object to picture matching, picture to picture matching, puzzles, sorting, 'parts of' books', and 3 part cards.  We also try to bring our unit study into other areas of the classroom. For example, in the Everyday Living area, children may scoop or pour fruit.  In the math area for our transportation unit, we have several counting works out with cars, trucks, airplanes and boats.  The unit study also allows us to give information about a topic that children may not have heard before.  When we studied fruits and vegetables, we talked about how fruit grows on trees, bushes or vines and that vegetables are parts of the plant that we eat:  root (carrot), stem (celery), leaves (spinach/lettuce) and flower (broccoli).  Three part cards are a wonderful work used throughout the classroom as well.  It has a picture with the name of the picture on it, then the children match the picture and the word.  For example, we had apple three part cards.  There is a picture of an apple, then all the different parts of an apple-stem, core, flesh, seeds, and skin.  Each card highlighted each part with a picture and name-the work is great for building visual discrimination skills as well as building vocabulary.  The children love working with our unit works and love learning new information about very familiar subjects!