Thematic teaching or thematic instruction highlights a theme through a thematic unit, or a course, or a series of courses within the social studies, or across disciplinary lines to make connections to other courses.
When teaching with themes, choose a theme that reoccurs throughout human history and is present in modern life. It can be a topic, such as vacation, quacks, cemeteries, utopias, or etiquette. Or themes can be overarching questions (essential questions or compelling questions).
Why teach with themes?
- Students learn better when experiencing knowledge in a larger context. They begin to see relationships and connections across time and disciplines.
- Learning about wider themes and related facts and skills more closely resembles how we experience life outside of the school and classroom
- Themes can be chosen that are current student-centered, incorporating the needs, interests and perspectives of the students.
- Carefully selecting topics and information related to a theme helps teachers narrow the overwhelming amount of knowledge in any discipline – so much history, so little time to teach it!
Interdisciplinary topics for thematic instruction
Daily life themes – food, family, housing, travel, manners, quacks, cemeteries, or utopias – can be used across the curriculum to make academic subjects relevant.
Learn more about the history of daily life themes, thematic units, and how to use themes in the elementary, middle, secondary, or college classroom . . . .
Cemeteries
Quack Cures & Snake oil
- Almanacs: Information before the Internet
- Cure for the Flu!? Don’t fall for quack cures
- Guest Blog Post – Teach Students Media Literacy with Historical Sources
Manners and Etiquette
- Guest Blog Post – How to Use Essential Questions to Focus Instruction in Social Studies
- Classroom Manners: Analyzing Behavior with Primary sources
- Relationship Etiquette: Classroom Activity
- An Eighteenth Century “Date”- Bundling
- What has replaced 19th Century Parlors and Calling Cards?
- Guest Blog Post – Using Etiquette Lessons to Discuss Culture and Analyze Primary Sources
Food
Food- Saleratus, Pudding and a Gill: How Old Words Reflect a Changing World
- Cookies and How Government Regulation Affects Daily Life
- Mrs. Bryan’s “Kentucky Housewife”: Managing a Household in the 1830s
- What’s a Shoat?
- How did humans survive without refrigerators?
- From Medieval Bread to School Lunches: Government Regulation of Food
Housing
- Consider Domestic Laborers this Labor Day
- Hall Stands and Parlor Organs: Status Symbols in the 19th Century Home
- What Can Historical Home Decorations tell us about the Past?
- Estate Inventories: Primary Sources for Daily Life in the Past
- Teaching Geography and Visual Literacy Skills with Historical Housing
- Guest Blog Post – What do big-screen TVs and pianos have in common? How the things we buy define social class
Travel and vacation themes
- Guest Blog Post – 5 Primary Sources to Make Students Think about Their Town in New Ways
- Pilgrimage as a Medieval “Vacation”
- The problem with asking students “What did you do on your summer vacation?”
- Camping: A Night Under the Stars is Not Always a Vacation
- Old Postcards: Messages about the Past
- What Amazing Egyptian Chicken Hatcheries Can Tell Us about Perceptions of Other Places
Thematic teaching on this website aligns with:
- Common Core Standards for English/Language Arts and for Literacy in History/Social Studies
- College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History by the National Council of Social Studies
- Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins
- Place-based Education
- Project-based Education
About the header image: Postcard of tobacco growers delivering their crop of cigar tobacco, Quincy, Florida.
Library of Congress.