Choose a positive characteristic such as "Respect" or "Friendship" for a theme and put it into action to encourage students to become more thoughtful and develop stronger relationships. "Teamwork," "Community Responsibility" and "Caring" can also make useful themes. These themes lend themselves to year-long projects. For instance, with a friendship theme, find an international classroom and become pen-pals. With a community responsibility theme, do fundraisers and collect food for a local animal shelter or soup kitchen throughout the year.
With the childhood obesity rate rising, a health and fitness theme ensures students leave first grade knowing how to stay healthy. Narrow it down to a specific topic such as healthy eating or exercise, or stick with a broad health theme. These themes give you a chance to teach children about food groups, sports and the importance of staying fit. A broad health theme also allows you to talk about hygiene and how to prevent the spread of germs.
First-graders are just starting to understand how large the world is, so a geography theme reinforces this lesson. Choosing a specific country or continent as your theme is an opportunity to teach children about another culture, while choosing the United States as your theme helps you teach students about their own culture and the history and geography of America. If you can’t choose just one country, broaden your theme to the world and choose a different country to focus on each month.
A literature theme helps develop your students’ emerging reading and writing skills. The decorations you hang on your walls for a literature theme will be filled with words, so first-graders will have plenty of print examples to help them practice reading. Narrowing down this theme too much will be difficult, though you may opt to have theme weeks for the works of certain authors. A literature theme is fairly easy to do since you can borrow new books from your library each week.