A good monthly theme starts with a big idea that children can touch, such as water, homes, food or the neighbourhood, and grows into four weeks of linked experiences: a first week to find out what children already know, two weeks of investigation, and a final week to bring the learning together. The plan should map each week to developmental goals and to the national programme, share the key language between Vietnamese and English, and leave deliberate space for questions the children raise themselves.
Monthly themes are one of the visible structures of the Global Nexus curriculum, alongside weekly projects, life simulations, workshops and field trips. They give a term its rhythm and give families something concrete to talk about at home. They can also become a trap: a theme that is decided in advance, decorated on the wall and delivered on schedule is little more than a topic. This guide describes how a teaching team can plan a theme so that it stays alive.
What makes a theme worth a month
Not every topic can carry four weeks of young children's attention. A theme earns its month when it passes three conditions. It must be present in the children's real lives, so they can bring knowledge from home and see it again outside school. It must offer things to handle and investigate, not just pictures to look at. And it must branch: one idea should lead naturally to several others, so that different children can follow different threads.
"Water" passes easily in Ho Chi Minh City. Children meet it in the afternoon downpours of the rainy season, in the bathtub, in the cooking pot, in the river they cross on the way to school and in the dragon fruit stall at the market washed down every morning. "Space" is harder. Children are curious about the moon and stars, but almost nothing about space can be touched, so the month risks becoming a sequence of pictures and craft rockets. That does not mean avoiding it, only shortening it or anchoring it in something tangible such as light, shadow and the night sky seen from home.
It also helps to test a candidate theme against the age group. Three-year-olds need themes rooted in the immediate: their bodies, their families, their food, the classroom pet. Five-year-olds can stretch further, to the neighbourhood, to how things are made, to places some of them have visited and others have not. A theme that is perfect for the older class can be too abstract for the younger one, and the reverse is just as common: a theme on colours may bore children who mastered colour names a year ago.
A useful habit is to choose themes with the children's calendar in mind. Mid-Autumn, Tet, the start of the rainy season and the end of the school year each bring their own experiences. A theme that coincides with what families are already doing at home gets twice the conversation.
Building the theme web as a team
The theme web is the planning tool most early-years teams use, and it works best when it is drawn by the whole team in one sitting rather than written by one person in advance. A simple sequence:
- Write the big idea in the centre and spend ten minutes listing everything it connects to, without judging. For "food" this might include markets, cooking, growing, taste, family meals, rice, fruit, animals, rubbish and sharing.
- Group the ideas into four or five branches that could each sustain a week or a strand of investigation, for example where food comes from, how food changes when we cook it, eating together and food in our neighbourhood.
- Under each branch, list possible experiences, not activities. "Sprouting mung beans in a jar and watching them each day" is an experience; "colour the vegetable sheet" is not.
- Mark the possible field trips, workshops and visitors, since these need booking and permission forms weeks ahead.
- Note what you expect children already know, so the first week can confirm or correct your guesses.
- Circle the two or three branches you will plan in detail, and leave the rest as options the children might pull you towards.
The web is a map of possibilities, not a schedule. Teams that try to cover every branch end up rushing; teams that go deep on two or three usually see more learning.
Mapping the theme to developmental goals
A theme is only as strong as the learning it supports. Once the web is drawn, map the planned experiences against the six Global Nexus dimensions and the developmental areas of Vietnam's national preschool programme, which covers physical, cognitive, language, social-emotional and aesthetic development. A simple grid keeps everyone honest. Here is an example for a month on food with a class of four- to five-year-olds:
| Planned experience | Main Global Nexus dimensions | National programme areas |
|---|---|---|
| Sprouting mung beans and recording growth each morning | Thinking, language | Cognitive, language |
| Preparing fresh spring rolls in small groups | Life skills, independence | Physical, social-emotional |
| Setting up a class market with real fruit and play money | Thinking, emotion, language | Cognitive, language, social-emotional |
| Painting with turmeric, beetroot and pandan juices | Creativity | Aesthetic, cognitive |
| Sharing a family dish story in circle time | Language, emotion | Language, social-emotional |
The grid reveals gaps quickly. If no planned experience supports physical development, add an outdoor game or a gardening task. If one child's needs, such as a child working on fine-motor control, are not served, adjust the materials. The grid is also what a curriculum lead or inspector will ask to see, and it shows families that a playful month still has clear purposes.
Planning the four weeks
A month that works well with young children usually has an arc. The first week is for discovery: provocations on the tables, a walk, a story, a conversation that finds out what children think. Write down their questions and their misconceptions, because these shape the next two weeks. If children believe that rice grows in bags at the shop, you have found your investigation.
The second and third weeks are for going deeper. This is where a field trip, a visiting parent, a cooking session or a longer project sits. Plan one anchor experience per week, something substantial that the rest of the week builds towards or reflects on, and surround it with smaller, related sessions in different areas of the room: the role-play corner, the block area, the art table and the reading nook.
The final week is for drawing things together. Children revisit what they made and found, look at photographs of the month, and share it with someone else, perhaps a younger class or their families at pickup. The point is not a polished performance but a chance to tell the story of what they learned. Teams that skip this week often find that the theme simply evaporates; teams that keep it find that children refer back to it for months.
Sharing the language between Vietnamese and English
In a bilingual classroom, theme planning includes a language plan. Before the month begins, the team agrees on a short set of key words and phrases in both languages, perhaps fifteen to twenty for older children and fewer for toddlers, chosen because they will come up naturally during the experiences. For food these might include verbs like wash, cut, mix, taste and their Vietnamese equivalents, describing words such as sweet, sour, soft, crunchy, and a few phrases children can use in role play.
The words are not drilled. They are modelled again and again during real activity, used in songs and stories, and picked up in reflection time. The team also agrees on how the two teachers divide the talk. A common pattern is for the Vietnamese teacher to lead discussion of ideas while the English-speaking teacher narrates actions and introduces new words alongside, but many teams vary this through the week so children hear complex thinking in English too.
Stories and songs chosen for the theme should exist in both languages where possible. Vietnamese folk songs about rice and the harvest sit well alongside English picture books about markets and cooking, and children often enjoy noticing that the same idea sounds different in each language.
A worked example: a month on water for three- to four-year-olds
To make the process concrete, here is how a team might sketch a water month for a class of three- to four-year-olds at the start of the rainy season. In the first week, the room fills with provocations: trays of water with sponges, cups and sieves, a basket of objects to test for floating, and a large window where children can watch the afternoon rain. The teachers listen for questions. Children ask where the rain goes, why puddles disappear and whether the fish at the market drink water.
In the second week the anchor experience is a rain walk in the courtyard after a downpour, with children in boots following the water to the drains and watching which puddles shrink fastest. The third week takes up the floating question: children predict, test and sort objects, then build boats from leaves, foil and recycled containers and try them in a long trough. Small parallel sessions run in the role-play corner, which becomes a car wash, and at the art table, where children paint with water on warm paving stones and watch the pictures fade.
The final week brings it together. Children look at photographs of their rain walk, retell what happened to the puddles, and show their boats to the younger class. The teachers check the planning grid: thinking, language and creativity were well served, while independence came through pouring and tidying. Notes on what to keep and what to change go into the folder for next year.
Leaving room for what children bring
The hardest discipline in theme planning is leaving space empty. Experienced teams keep roughly a third of the month unplanned on purpose, so that a question raised by a child can become the next investigation. If, during the food month, a group becomes fascinated by the ants that appear whenever biscuit crumbs fall on the floor, the team can follow that thread: watching ants, testing which foods attract them, drawing them through a magnifier. It still sits inside the theme, and it belongs to the children.
This is the emergent side of the curriculum, and it is where the influence of Reggio Emilia shows most. It does not mean abandoning the plan. The developmental goals stay fixed; the route to them flexes. A short weekly review, fifteen minutes at the end of Friday, is enough to decide whether to stay on the plan, follow a new question or drop something that is not working.
Write down each change and the reason for it. Over a year these notes become a record of how your school's curriculum actually lives, and they are invaluable when training new teachers or opening a new campus. For an overview of how Global Nexus organises its curriculum framework, see the curriculum section of this site; schools interested in training for owners and teachers can find details at globalnexus.edu.vn.
Câu hỏi thường gặp
Should all classes in a school share the same monthly theme?
Sharing a theme across a school helps with shared events, family communication and resource planning, but each class should interpret it for its own age group. A toddler room and a five-year-old room exploring water will do very different things, and forcing identical activities across ages usually serves the younger children poorly.
How far in advance should a theme be planned?
Most teams draw the theme web and book trips four to six weeks ahead, then plan each week in detail during the week before. Planning every day of the month in advance leaves no room to respond to children, while planning only a few days ahead makes it impossible to arrange visitors and trips.
What if children lose interest halfway through the month?
Look first at whether the experiences are hands-on enough and whether there is a real question to pursue. If interest has genuinely moved on, it is better to bring the theme to an early close with a short sharing week than to drag children through planned activities that no longer mean anything to them.
How do we involve families in a monthly theme?
Tell families the big idea and a few key words at the start of the month, invite them to share something from home such as a recipe, an object or a skill, and show them what the children explored at the end. Keep requests light; families should never feel they must buy materials or prepare elaborate projects.
Do themes still matter for babies and toddlers?
Themes matter less for children under two, whose learning follows daily routines and sensory exploration more than topics. Many teams use a loose seasonal focus for these groups, such as water play in the rainy months, and keep the emphasis on responsive care and repeated experiences rather than on a defined topic.
How do monthly themes relate to weekly projects?
The theme sets the broad territory for a month, while a weekly project is a focused investigation of one question within it. A month on homes might contain a project on building a shelter strong enough to survive a fan-made storm. Projects can also cross theme boundaries when children's interest carries on.