Ep #43: Using Themes to Raise Smarter Preschoolers

If you’re like me, you also as a parent want to do some extra stuff at home with your kids. And this is such a good way to kind of help you curate what that might look like. I think it’s going to be very helpful. I hope you enjoy it, it’s coming up right after this.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast, where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow, and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can, all while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

Today’s episode is kind of interesting and fun, and I’m excited to share it with you. It sounds like it’s kind of made for preschool teachers, and it is, but it’s also for parents. And if you have ever had a preschool aged child, or are expecting to, this one is relevant to you.

So the topic itself is why do we use, what is the science behind using themes in preschool? And we’re going to go into that and I’m going to talk about why it’s relevant and how you can use this even if you’re not a preschool teacher. But when I first started teaching preschool, I would say 14 years ago or so, I kind of went with a letter of the week idea. I think that’s kind of what I’d seen done and I thought that that was relevant.

And hopefully I don’t get a lot of hate over this, but this is actually not how I would teach preschool at all. And so, of course, if you go into our programs, our Mommy and Me preschool program, and what we create for teachers that’s being used all around the world, we very much work in themes. And I’m going to talk a little bit about why we do that.

And there’s kind of three basic things I want to go over, three basic reasons why we use themes to teach in preschool. And if you’re working with kids, and just doing learning at home with your kids, you can use this same kind of idea for the same reasons. So I’m going to share it with you.

So let’s first talk just a little bit more about letter of the week and why I don’t love it. And then we’ll go into these three reasons and why they work better using themes. So letter of the week, of course, we want kids to learn all their letters. There’s a couple challenges with letter of the week.

First of all, if you’re following an alphabetical order, which is what our brains love to do because our brains love order. But the challenge is, that’s not actually the way that kids are going to be using those letters, right? The kids don’t know the order yet of the alphabet necessarily, and it doesn’t really matter to their brains because that’s not how they’re going to be using them. And so if we’re trying to teach in order, we’re not teaching them in the order that those letters are actually going to be used in highest use. So that’s one challenge.

Another challenge is that it really kind of sets a specific pace for learning where a lot of children are going to be learning at very different rates, right? We know this, kids do not learn at the same rates, which is wonderful, right? Because some of us learn faster in some things and some learn faster in other things and we want to be able to meet that.

And so what we’re looking for is something that’s maybe a little bit more organic that allows us to learn letters in an order of use and the way that we would want to actually – A highest frequency kind of thing, right? And also to be able to move at their own pace and kind of offer a little bit more opportunity for differentiation and being able to go faster or slower.

Okay, so let’s talk about the difference in teaching in actual themes. And so what I mean by that is when we’re teaching like an apple theme, and we’re teaching a pumpkin theme and just kind of around different ideas, community helpers, and all the different fun themes that we do throughout the year. They’re so cute and adorable, but there’s more to it than being cute and adorable and we’re going to talk about why.

The first reason is the learning is a lot more organic. Just to give you an example of what I mean by that, I was talking to my cute friend, Caitlin, who was a teacher in Florida. And she was teaching at an English school and she said that they would spend much longer than we spend with our units on a specific theme.

So, for example, they would spend three to four months on a circus theme. And everything that they would do, their math activities, their English activities, everything that they were doing in school, their science activities, all of it came back to this circus theme. And they would just kind of work on this and everything was so interconnected and related.

Now what I love about this is when we’re teaching math and we’re sitting here and we’re doing early math and we’re teaching counting or we’re teaching addition, or any concept in early math. And we’re trying to help you understand that if you have $3 and you’re trying to get to $5 for a ticket, how many more dollars do you need?

And if we just do the numbers, and we’re like, hey, what’s three plus two? Or if we’re trying to get to five and we have three, how many more do we need? That’s just numbers and it’s very random and it doesn’t mean a whole lot. There’s not a whole lot of context there.

But if we’re telling a kid, hey, you’re trying to buy popcorn at the popcorn stand at the circus, or you’re trying to get a ticket to the circus and you only have $3, and it costs $5. How are you going to get that extra? What more do we need? What’s left?

Then they’re invested. They care. They understand popcorn. They understand wanting to get into the circus and they’re invested and they want to know how much more they need and they care all of the sudden. And you’ve just engaged them and they care and they’re interested, right?

And so we’re teaching them not only the skill of how to find the difference between three and five, but we’re also helping them understand the reason why it matters, which makes them so much more invested. It makes the learning better, the neural connections in our brain are going to be so much stronger around this concept that they’re learning.

So this idea of organic learning is much more powerful. It gives it reason and purpose, but it also allows us to store more information because it pulls things together that are relevant, which is really, really important for how our brains work and how they store information.

So, obviously, this is really cool. We want to do this. Hopefully, this is what you’re getting in preschool, right? We can see why that’s relevant. But at home, you can do it as well. In fact, when my kindergarteners or first graders would bring home an assignment to do from school, their homework, and they would say, “Mom, I just don’t understand.” And they’d show me this math problem and I could immediately take it and try to relate it to something that was in their current environment, right?

So if it was fall, we could talk about how many apples or if it was close to Halloween. I love using holidays. Holidays are such a fun, exciting way to help bring things in. And so we would say, “Okay, if you got this many candies from Halloween, and you had to divide that among four people, how many is each child going to get?”

And it just takes it from this kind of obscure random concept that they’re supposed to be learning into something that makes sense to them, that they get, that is valuable to them, and they can see its relevance in their life.

Okay, let’s move on to the second reason that we want to use themes in preschool. Now this one is really interesting. I’ve been reading some fascinating books lately on vocabulary and how to teach children words. So one of the books I’ve been reading is Teaching Words and How They Work by, I believe you pronounce this Elfrieda Hiebert. And it’s just a super fascinating book.

She says that children are expected to encounter 150,000 different words over their school careers. And historically, kind of the way that we’re doing vocabulary has been something like, hey, we’re going to target six to eight words a week and maintain that across all their grades, right? And kind of just keep introducing them to their vocabulary list and have them write down the definitions and practice and try to memorize it and come back for a quiz on Friday, right?

But here’s the challenge, if we target six to eight words a week, they’re going to be directly taught, students will be taught about 3500 words during their school careers. So if you look at the gap between 3,500 words that we’re teaching, directly teaching students and 150,000 words that they’re going to be exposed to over their school careers, there’s a massive gap there.

So what do we do about that? And how do we sneak more words in without just spending all day sitting and memorizing words, right? That’s not fun and also not really effective for our brains. Well, a couple of things we need, right? So we need repetition. We also need context, because part of comprehension, and word comprehension is understanding what a word means, being able to picture what it means in our heads.

So we want to hear the word, have multiple exposures to it, we need to hear it in context, right? And we want to see it so we can kind of put it in our lexicon, right? So when you’re working in a theme, you are able to get that vocabulary because we’re reading read-alouds day after day that come from the same type of theme.

And so we’re hearing similar words, maybe slightly different variations of words, but words that are all related from these various read-alouds that we’re doing or from the various activities we’re doing. They’re all based around the same topic and we’re getting some of that repetition. We’re also getting context and related words.

So one of the things I’ve been learning about as a strategy to get more vocabulary in is word webs. And we take words that are related or similar to each other and we kind of start teaching them as a group, and helping kids kind of learn words as a group or this web of words, which helps them to learn and keep in memory substantially more words than if we’re just giving them a random list of vocabulary to try to memorize.

Our brains are like a really cool folder system, organization system inside our brains. And so if we can put words in groups and kind of like put them into file folders, it’s so much easier to keep them there than all these random differences like, here’s a word here and a file there.

If you’re thinking through your computer system, there’s all these random documents here and there and everywhere, right, and a little bit crazy, right? But what if we could just folder them together? And here’s a group of words, and this all goes under this category. And this all goes under this category. And then when you go to retrieve in our brains, they can come out that way. And it’s so much easier to store them and so much easier to recall those words.

And let’s talk about for just a second why vocabulary matters so much. So what we know is when a child is learning to read, when they’re trying to store something in their lexicon, if it’s a word that they already know, that they’ve heard before, they understand the meaning of it and they know what that word is. Then as they see it to read, as they’re trying to make that hot-wired section of their brain that’s the reading part of their brain between the speech and the visual part of their brain, right, as they’re working through that.

When they see that word repeatedly, they’re going to remember it much faster if they already know what the word means, if they’ve already been exposed to that word. So when we’re introducing a child to a new word on paper and trying to help them read it, if they’ve never heard the word before, if they don’t know what it means, if they don’t care about it at all, then it’s going to take them much longer to learn to read that word and then to build it into a speed in their brain that they can read it almost on site, right? Memorize without having to sound it out.

So that happens substantially faster if they’re already familiar with the word. And this is going to help them read faster. It also helps them build language, right? When we’re talking about building a story and being able to communicate and starting to be able to write and express themselves and use language, build it, take it apart, understand it, all of those things we want them to be able to do with words, it’s the whole point.

Then the more vocabulary they have, the more power they have to be able to say what they want to say. To be able to express themselves. To be able to understand their world and what they’re seeing and hearing, and then take it, learn from it and reshare what they’ve built with that.

This is also going to substantially help them in reading comprehension tests and in testing through school because when they know the vocabulary, they can read it much faster. There’s the saying that reading tests or reading comprehension tests are basically knowledge tests in disguise, right? And so the more knowledge we can set these kids up with, the better off they’re going to be throughout the rest of their school careers in their different testing and just being able to expand on what they already know.

Okay, so we’ve talked about how themes make learning more organic than just random concepts we’re trying to put into a child’s brain, right? And we’ve talked about vocabulary and why vocabulary matters, first of all. It’s so important. And then how teaching in themes really supports building vocabulary so much faster than a vocabulary list, right?

Okay, so number three. The third reason we really want to use themes in preschool is because of the experience and the fun of it, right? So much of what we’re doing in learning his repetition because we have to get it into our brain enough times that it sticks and then we build those neural pathways, we build it, we anchor it in, we keep it there, right? And so we have to keep doing it over and over again.

And then we build on it and build on it a little bit more, right? We’re doing a lot of repetition and that can get boring. And when you get really bored, sometimes you can kind of lose your focus. And no matter how motivated you feel, if you’re not focusing on the experience a little bit, you might run out of motivation because we can’t fight our brains forever, right?

And so if you can focus on experience, the science, the research shows that people get a lot farther when they focus on experience than when they focus on goals. And I think there’s something to be said for kind of doing a little bit of both. I think goals are very healthy, but I think focusing on an experience and creating the best experience possible keeps people a lot longer. And people that are consistent and go a lot longer make more progress than people that are really motivated for two days and then done, right?

So just think about going to the gym, right? If you’re focused on goals and you set these awesome goals for yourself, “I’m going to do this, it’s going to be amazing.” And we go for like the first week and we did amazing and we’re so proud of ourselves. And then we feel like we got hit by a bus because our muscles are so sore and we’re tired and something happened and we didn’t get enough sleep and it’s just so hard to fight our brains to keep that going for a long period of time, right?

And if you kind of contrast that with, I’m going to find a way to make going to the gym so stinking fun that I love it, that it’s so fun for me. Like I’m going to go with my friends and I’m going to hang out with them every morning and we’re going to have a good time at the gym, right?

Or I’m going to go work towards this fun thing that I’m doing. I’m going to go listen to a podcast while I work out or I’m going to listen to – I have people that I know that have songs, their song lists, their playlists, they can only listen to while they’re at the gym. And so they’ll put on these really fun songs, but they can only listen to those ones at the gym, right? So focusing on this experience and creating something amazing.

So there’s a lot of research around that. And if we can bring that to our learning, if we can create an experience that keeps kids invested but wanting to come back and wanting to keep learning and pushing themselves to keep doing it because the experience is so fun, they’re enjoying it, they’re engaged in it, right?

Then they keep coming, and they keep coming and they keep working on it and working on it without as much resistance, right? And that helps them make a lot of progress, which is what we’re trying to do. So one of the things I love about using themes in preschool, is it keeps it really fun. And it keeps it really interesting.

And it focuses on experience as well as play, which is what we bring into all of our preschool programs. Mommy and Me Preschool is so focused on play as well as the themes. And then we also, of course, bring that into all of our Planning Playtime products that are being used in classrooms all over the world.

So we do a lot of play. And there’s so many other things built into it, too. This is why we have a lot of occupational therapists and things using our products as well, because there’s so many other skills they’re building at the same time that you don’t even know about that we just sneak in there. And it’s so fun and the kids don’t even know that they’re building all these really cool skills.

So, themes allow us to kind of go into something that a child’s already really excited about. They allow us to tap into that excitement a child already has around the circus, or already has around Halloween, or already has around Valentine’s Day or whatever that is, and bring that into their learning. And so it is interesting because it looks different.

So yeah, we’re doing basically the same alphabet type of activities we did last week, we’re still learning beginning sounds right? We’re getting ready to read, that’s such a cool skill, right? We’re still learning about what’s one more or one less, right? All these skills kind of like the early math skills or shapes or different things, right? We’re still doing that, but we’re doing it with unicorns this week, whereas like last week we were kind of going fishing and our camping theme.

And so it just brings a different type of energy to it and a funness and an excitement and a newness to it, even though we’re kind of repeating some of the things so many times over and over and over again. And so what’s happening is we’re building this really, really firm knowledge base in our kids’ brains, but they’re just enjoying it because they’re getting to do something different every week.

Okay, so there is so much more we could talk about, I love talking about preschool themes. This is obviously something we’re really passionate about here because we do it in all of our preschool curriculums and products that we provide.

But I wanted to just give you kind of a brief overview of that so you could understand why we do it. Because I think sometimes it just looks so cute and so fun that we think that that’s why. And that’s helpful, right? There’s nothing wrong with cute and fun. We love cute and fun, it’s amazing. But it goes so much deeper than that.

And I wanted you to kind of just get a little glimpse of that so that if you’re a teacher, you can understand why it’s important and include that in your curriculum planning. And if you’re a parent, you can look for someone who knows that to be a teacher for your child. And then you can also continue to support that with learning at home and the books you get from the library and bring home.

Now I’m actually doing a theme with my kids where we’re going through ancient civilization. And so we’re right now learning about ancient China. So all of the books in my kids’ reading nook right now in my little reading area in my front living room at my house are read-alouds, chapter books, things from ancient China. And they can be folktales or they can be stories from history. Or just for fun we got to get a book on the Chinese zodiac and everyone got to figure out what their animal was from the year they were born. It was a lot of fun.

And are my kids learning any of this in school right now? No, it’s not related to what they’re learning in school, but we have a theme actually going at home. And so we’re kind of getting a lot of repetition in vocabulary they’re learning, in the history they’re learning and just understanding culture and getting to learn some folklore. And so they’re getting all this really cool stuff, and basically it’s just in the books that I’m getting from the library.

Now, of course, we do some fun activities, too. So we built the Great Wall of China out of graham crackers and they had a really fun STEM project. And we may have even kind of used some engineering and things to build a great wall of China in our living room and then had various attacks from the Huns and the Mongols and kind of discussed some world history. It was a lot of fun. Lots of play, lots of silliness. And, of course my kids are learning an appreciation of world history.

Now, my kids are a little bit older, my kids aren’t preschoolers anymore. You could do that with preschoolers but it’s a little bit more advanced. But certainly you could get books around the pond. You could get books around apples. You could fill your reading nook with books around the zoo or the circus and kind of get some of that same type of benefit, that same type of learning. And then, of course, as they get older, you can kind of change out those books and give them whatever you want. And it’s amazing.

Thank you so much for coming and listening today to our chat about preschool themes. And, of course, if you ever have any questions or want to know more about what we do or just want to chat, I’m such a chatter. So send me an email Amy@planningplaytime. You can also leave us a review on our podcast, we so appreciate that.

Or come find us on social media, we’re there. The team Planning Playtime, we’re there every day. So come say hi to us and talk to us moms that are just there doing all this stuff with you. And we can’t wait to hear from you. Thank you, and I’ll catch you here next week.

Hey, friend, so we just talked all about how important it was to do themes in preschool. And hopefully you’re all pumped and excited to go do it because it’s amazing and we talked about the science of why it’s so cool. But how do you actually put that into place?

Now, of course, you can go and try to piece it together, right? You can go onto Pinterest and dig and search and Google and try to find things on Instagram and piecemeal something together and it takes forever. And I know that because I used to do that when I taught preschool. Or you can get Mommy and Me Preschool right now.

And Mommy and Me Preschool is amazing, it was written with this in mind. And it’s not only built in themes, it’s got all these amazing activities that include all of the fine motor and gross motor and science and math and all these things that you need. But get this, it even includes the book list. So when you’re doing those read-alouds we talked about in the episode today, you have a list put together for you where you just go to the library and pick them out. It’s kind of amazing, such a cool resource.

We have those song lists for you, so you can go right on YouTube, get some of the best music artists of the day and listen to their preschool songs, bring that into your classroom. And the very best part is it is done for you, which is amazing. So you can get all the benefits of the stuff we just talked about, wow the students, wow your parents, all those things. And you can do it right from your Mommy and Me Preschool portal. It’s amazing.

So this is made for moms to use at home with kids, but it’s also made for teachers and we have so many teachers using it all over the country. So pause this for a second, get out your pen and paper and write this down. It is mommyandmepreschool.com, that is mommyandmepreschool.com. Go get the curriculum today. It is so fantastic. And you’ll be joining over 13,000 other moms and teachers already using this all over the world. So you’re in great company.

We can’t wait to share it with you and maybe make your life a little bit easier while you make life amazing for your kiddos.

Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website planningplaytime.com. See you next week.