Web Resources for Integrated Thematic Teaching
Courses: ED424 & ED443
Instructor: Ray Doiron, Ph.D.
University of Prince Edward Island
Faculty of Education

Individual Articles
Comprehensive Sites
Examples of Thematic Units
Planning Thematic Units

Individual Articles

Integrated Curriculum, by Kathy Lake

A useful beginners look at what is the integrated curriculum and how it looks in schools today. Good basic information for all teachers.

Animals and Occupations: Why Theme-Based Curricula Work
by Sally Rollins Hurley and Sally Blake

This article gives good basic reasons why thematic units work especially for young children. It would be useful to use with parents or to help you explain why you use a thematic approach.

Thematic Units: Integrating the Curriculum
by Sylvia M. Vardell

One of the best articles to give you an overview of thematic teaching and working with elementary and intermediate students. Very useful.

Teaching Interdisciplinary Thematic Units in Language Arts
by Naomi Ritter

This ERIC document gives a definition and rationale for interdisciplinary thematic units and reports on a study examining the impact of this approach in one school. It gives you a research-based rationale for your thematic work.

Comprehensive Sites

Integrating Information Literacy into the Curriculum

This comprehensive website provides a rationale for integrating information literacy into all aspects of the curriculum, shows how a school-wide approach using the Kulthau model would work and provides examples of information literacy projects.

Thematic Reading Curriculum

Using reading as a focus, this site shows how reading can be developed in more effective ways by taking a thematic approach. It gives you background, definitions, examples from reading programs, planning hints and examples of feedback from students on the thematic approach.

What is ITI?

This is the title of one section of a comprehensive site dedicated to our understanding of integrated thematic learning and teaching. Sandy Kovalik provides an understanding of ITI drawn from the new understanding of how the brain works. Fascinating stuff!

Cross-Curricular Thematic Instruction

MaryEllen Vogt has built this comprehensive site with information on what cross-curricular thematic units are, how they are developed what are their advantages and useful ideas for assessment and getting started. Very useful.
 

Examples of Thematic Units

Thematic Units for Primary Grades

The students at the University of South Caroline developed these examples of thematic units to use with primary grades. A useful site to see how other pre-service students have worked.

Building Information Literacy

Department of Education site for developing information literacy activities and units. A must for all UPEI preservice people.

Thematic Planning Units

This site contains 26 Primary and 16 Elementary units that are well-developed and easy to adapt to our schools. They follow a consistent planning structure and are easy to download for your use.

Planning Thematic Units

A 15-day Planning Guide

This site offers a short overview of planning a thematic unit to be completed in 15 days. It is easy to follow and useful to add to your repertoire of planning tools.

Planning Cross-Curricular Thematic Units

This site gives you a general overview of what goes into a thematic unit. It will not give you the detail you may need but it at least shows the big pieces in the planning process. It complements the MaryEllen Vogt site above.

The Community Learning Network’s Index of Theme Pages

This comprehensive site allows you to search alphabetically for thematic resources on dozens of topics use din our school curriculum. You may not copy the whole theme, but I guarantee you will find some amazing links to WWW resources that you can use in your school library program.