Annual Instructional Theme

Annual Instructional Theme

Every year, Chicago Friends School chooses an annual instructional theme. This theme provides a common thread for instruction throughout the year, opportunities to collaborate across classrooms, and inspiration for field trips and service projects.

2025–2026: Living Together

Through theme studies, students will allow explore living together from both a human cultural perspective and from a biological one. How do we shape and how are we shaped by our surroundings and interactions, in the human and natural worlds? Field trips will also be based on the theme. We will explore different cultures and human ways of living at the Field Museum and how we live ecologically at the Conservatory and other sites.

This year’s classroom names are based on items you might find in a Chicago ecosystem: Sunshine for K-1, Wildflowers for 2-3, Butterflies for 4-5, and Naked Mole Rats for the middle school.

2024–2025: Explore and Investigate

This year’s social studies is focused on Chicago, US, and world history, and our science emphasis is on physical science and engineering. Our writing focus will be on non-fiction and explanatory writing.

The themes of exploration and investigation can be seen in all of these subjects. In order to learn what happened in the past, we must investigate primary sources, first person accounts, maps and other sources. We can explore our physical spaces, and investigate what happens when we do an experiment in the lab. Exploration also plays a part in our history stories, as peoples move over the globe and discover new places and new civilizations.

Classroom names are based on our theme. This year the K-1 homeroom will be called the Explorers, the 2-3 homeroom will be called the Questioneers, the 4-5 homeroom will be called the Compasses, and the middle school will be the Bermuda Triangles.

Finally, the theme helps us to pick field trips, including the first of the year — exploring Illinois habitats at North Park Nature Center.

2023–2024: Bedrock

This year’s theme is Bedrock. We will allow the idea of bedrock to inspire book choices, discussions, and artistic explorations. Bedrock can be thought of literally, as the rock beneath our feet (as is the case of the book being explored above) ,but also metaphorically, as describing the foundational ideas, beliefs or principals that support us as people. In this way it is fitting to both our science focus this year, which will be Earth Science, and our Social Studies focus, which will be Civics. For example, one of the first things that we explored in art this year were the cave paintings of Lascaux.

The theme also inspires our classroom names. This year the K-2 homeroom will be called the Pebbles. The 3-4 homeroom will be the Marbles, the 5th grade homeroom will be the Geodes, and the middle schoolers chose Fossils for their class name.

2022–2023: Mirrors and Lenses

This year, our science focus is life science. Our social studies focus is culture and geography. And our writing focus is autobiography and personal writing. Mirrors and lenses fit into all three emphases, because mirrors and lenses provide us opportunities to look more closely at ourselves, and our world. They also remind us that the way we see the world is shaped by the lens through which we see it.

Field trips planned:

  • The Art Institute — to look at self portraits, and opportunities for all students to create their own self portraits in art class
  • The Field Museum — to look at cultures and cultural lenses around the world
  • The National Museum of Mexican Art — to examine art that explicates Latin American culture
  • A whole-school personal essay “jam” akin to a poetry jam
  • A trip to a nearby nature preserve to think about how different “lenses” affect how we interact with wilderness and nature.

2021–2022: Momentum

We explored the idea of momentum in our physical science curriculum, in literature, and also as we studied history in social studies. Momentum is a property of social movements, of groups and organizations, and of bouncing balls and running students.

2020–2021: Patterns and Changes

Essential themes:  

  • Day and night, seasonal and lunar patterns, and how the changes are predictable
  • The predictable patterns of erosion, deposition, and how they cause changes in the natural environment
  • Pattern and repetition in art and music
  • Voter and civic behavior causing changes in our national, local, and state governments

While no field trips were possible during this Covid year, we did have a virtual field trip where musicians from a djembe (African drumming) group came and worked with our students and were still able to do a fall (beach clean up) and spring (food drive and planting) service project.  

2019–2020: Seeds and Roots

Essential themes:

  • Ecology — the relationship between the environment,  plants, and animal life
  • Biology — life cycles of plants, animals, and people
  • Cultural seeds and roots — Influences on societies as they develop and grow
  • World religions and their relationships with individuals and society
  • Individual seeds and roots — What causes us to grow into the people we are

Field trips for the 2019-2020 school year included the Lincoln Park Conservatory, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum, and local Houses of Worship. Fall service included planting native grasses with the Lincoln Park Conservancy and making and delivering sack lunches to a local organization that serves homeless youth.  Our spring trimester, interrupted by the Covid-19 epidemic, featured an at-home service day where students proposed and did a service project that aided their families or neighbors. Also, during the Covid shutdown, the school hosted Edgewater Mutual Aid’s community food drive.  

During this challenging time of social distancing, students celebrated with a daily pattern guessing game that united our three instructional “pods” virtually.  

2017–2018: Circles

Essential themes include:

  • Circles of belonging — communities
  • Circles of responsibility, power, and authority — government and civics
  • Circles in space – planets, and orbits
  • Nightly circles — day and night, moon phases
  • The cycle of the year — seasons in nature
  • Biogeochemical cycles — water cycle, carbon cycle

Field trips related to the Circles theme were:

  • The Adler Planetarium
  • The alderman’s local office and City Hall
  • Loyola Beach and Nature Preserve
  • The Museum of Broadcast Communications
  • Montrose Harbor Bird Sanctuary
  • The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

Our year-long service project was to make, stock, and install “circulating” little libraries in different neighborhoods in Chicago.

2015–2016: Chicago

Essential ideas in the Chicago theme included:

  • Chicago history from pre-European settlement until today
  • Immigration and the Great Migration
  • Urban infrastructure
  • Architecture
  • Jazz and the blues
  • Neighborhood economics
  • City government

Field trips related to the Chicago theme included:

  • Mitchell Museum of the American Indian
  • Swedish American Museum
  • The DuSable Museum of African American History
  • The Green Mill jazz club
  • Chicago History Museum
  • Chicago Architecture Foundation
  • The Pullman Historic District

Our school-wide service project this year happened while we were studying immigration. First, students learned about the different reasons for immigration and then, working with Heartland Alliance, made refugee welcome kits.