Keeping the theme alive all year

Day 5 of blogging each day in June for the "Spilling Ink" Challenge

Last year was the first year that my staff voted on a school-wide theme for this year. We started out the year with the theme and decorations around the building, but that's really as far as it went. This year I took the time to visit another school that has kept their theme alive all year to build unity and learning. From the ideas gathered there, our staff met to come up with ideas to keep our theme alive all year and build unity throughout the school.

Here's what we came up with for next school year:
2010-2011 School-Wide Theme
“Around the World in 180 Days”
•First week of school we will send information home with students about our theme and a contest for students/families to design the logo for our theme that will be on our school t-shirts. The logo must include a hot air balloon in the picture.

•Each grade level has a designated continent for the year. The classrooms/grade level hallways can be decorated for this theme from the start of the school year. Each grade level will research their continent and create a simple newsletter that will go home with all students to share what they’ve learned about their continent. We could also figure out a way to include facts about the continent on the morning announcements during that grade level’s month for sharing (maybe just for a week on the announcements).
4K Antarctica
5K Africa
1st South America
2nd North America
3rd Europe
4th Asia
5th Australia

•Once we have received student pictures, each student will be given a cut-out of a hot air balloon with their picture on it to send out to a relative/friend as their personal version of a “Flat Stanley” to receive information back about that place to post in the hallways of the school to learn about that location.

•Post Card project: At the beginning of the year we will include an article in the Dodgeland Connection asking parents/community members to help us with this project. We will be seeking post cards for locations outside of the United States…they can be sent to Dodgeland from themselves if on a vacation or ask family/friends that live out of the US to send them to us. We will have them on display with a world map on one of the main hallway bulletin boards.


•We will plan a Cultural Fair as our culminating end of school activity.

•Music concerts could incorporate songs within each grade level from the continents they are learning about.

•We will go back to having a Character Trait for each month and have students nominated by teachers each month for displaying this Character Trait instead of the generic Student of the Month.


I'd love to hear what other schools do to keep their school-wide theme alive all year.