NYC Theme

Living in a borough of NYC means we have one of the greatest cities at our fingertips. So when my kids started showing an interest in things they saw in books related to the city, I quickly planned the following week around NYC. My kids enjoyed it so much that we ended up learning about NYC for two weeks. We learned about a couple famous landmarks, put on our own Broadway Show, took a “subway ride” with our own metro cards, “walked” across the Brooklyn Bridge and took a ferry to Staten Island. My kids quickly learned to tell the difference between the Empire State Building and The Chrysler Building. We focused more on the ESB painting a giant cardboard model and making our own individual ESBs. The Brooklyn Bridge was teacher created, but then we made taxis to go on it, a river and ferries to go under it and the Statue of Liberty to be seen from it. This group was very interested in the Subway after reading the book Subway by Christoph Niemann. So we studied a NYC Subway map, made our own subway car out of a huge box and made our own subway system on the wall of the classroom with individualized subway cars.  Parents were coming into the classroom over the weeks that followed this theme telling me that their child would yell and get excited when he saw the ESB for real and they were so proud of him it cemented the fact that we had done our job well in teaching this unit! 

The success of our NYC unit and a heavy interest in art led to a unit on NYC museums and famous artists.