ABSTRACT
Themes are important in children’s learning. As humans we try to make sense of the world around us and schema theory suggests that we tend to store much of what we know in schemata, which are simply memory ‘containers’ for our experiences. We could, for example, have a poetry schema where we store all we know about poetry. This, however, is insufficient to help us to read and understand poetry, as we need to make connections between what we know and what we are struggling to understand. In order to fully make sense of a poem about the snow, for example, we need memories of it falling, drifting, melting, freezing and riming the hedgerows. As we need to bring so much of our wider world knowledge to reading and writing it can be powerful to organise children’s learning in themes or topics – a common practice in the 1980s and 1990s, and one that has been revived by the publication Excellence and Enjoyment (DfES, 2003). This encourages schools to take control of their curriculum and be flexible in their organisation and the Qualification and Assessment Authority (QCA) has encouraged teachers to take a cross-curricular approach to their work through the QCA/DfES-published schemes of work.
