 At Creative Scholars Preschool in Chicago, we have four classrooms: Picassos, Mozarts, Shakespeares, and Amigos, named for each of our four arts – visual arts, music, drama and foreign language that we apply to our curriculum. Our curriculum goal is to tie all elements of the program together with a weekly theme. For example, if the weeks’ theme is the color blue we may focus on Picasso’s blue period, listen to blues music and talk about what instruments we hear, discuss what it means to feel “blue” and demonstrate the feeling with our bodies, and learn the name of the color blue as well as a couple of simple phrases in the foreign language. In addition, we may do easy science experiments with water, experiment with different shades of blue paint, go on a treasure hunt for blue items, and have each child contribute a page to a class book about their favorite thing that is blue. We will always be reading several books daily in both English and the foreign language that are related to the weeks’ theme.
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