Think of a theme. A thematic curriculum usually has a reoccurring concept. Possible theme ideas are the ocean, space, farms or pond life. Other ideas for a theme are the jungle and rainforest. Make sure you choose a theme that will keep students interested.
Review the standards for your grade level set by your state. Use the standards from the various subject areas to base your thematic curriculum.
Choose a subject to begin with. Use the standard from a subject area and begin listing activities that can be done to teach that standard. Write down the subject, the standard, activities and resources. For example, if creating a unit about pond life, write Reading as the heading and then the standard. Choose stories that take place near a pond and vocabulary words that can be introduced using the stories. Also list reading concepts that can be taught with the stories such fact and fiction, main idea and details or cause and effect. Look for resources in your school and local library such as story books, movies and teacher resource books. Also search the Internet for streaming videos and ask other teachers you work with for ideas and resources related to your theme. Apples 4 the Teacher has a list of books that can be used with themes about things such as bats, bears and dinosaurs.
Continue with the next subject. Write the heading for the subject, standard, list of activities and resources. Do this for as many subjects included in the thematic curriculum. Make sure that the activities in the thematic curriculum are connected. Continuing with the pond life theme example, in Reading, allow the students to read a book about pond life, in Language Arts, allow students to learn spelling words based on pond life, in Math allow students to create a graph based on a picture of animals at a pond and in Science, allow students to read about the habitat of a pond during different seasons. The key idea is that the theme is represented and connected to each subject.