Understanding Your Class
When the children are at play, what are they talking about? What sort of pretend play are they doing? This is the first step in designing a curriculum. There are a lot of other resources on emergent curriculum, which is using the children's interests to build your curriculum.

Brainstorming Methods
Start by choosing your theme. It's better if you start with something broad. I don't usually like to use a theme unless I can have enough activities for the entire two weeks or a month. I like two week or longer themes, to get really immersed. But you can then narrow down the theme to be more specific for each week. For instance, I might choose the Ocean for the theme, then each week for a month I might do activities on- animals, water, the beach and ships. Or I might stick with ocean animals for two weeks because there are so many, and cut out ships, or go longer than a month. These four themes are great though because you can have an on going mural, where first the water is painted, then a project involving animals can be glued on- add sand and beach projects during the beach week and then paintings of ships can be put on for ships week. By the end, it is a very complicated and beautiful mural.

There are many brainstorming methods you can use to get a little narrower with your topic. The way I do it, is to ask the questions below about my subject and create an activity based on the answers. You can come up with your own questions for other topics. I'm going to use bunnies as an example. You can do this with any animal and you will come up with enough actitives for at least one week. A single animal typically will not present more than a week of activities, but I might use these along with other animals of the same type or things that belong in the same season.

Ask yourself:
What do bunnies eat?
Where do bunnies live?
What do bunnies look like?
What are baby bunnies called? How are they different from adult bunnies?
How do bunnies move?

Each answer is a project!

Question	Answer	Activities
What do bunnies eat?	carrots, radishes, lettuce, cabbage	cut out pictures of what bunnies eat from magazines. glue to a group collage, individual collage or small paper plate or do a cooking projecct with those foods, soup, etc...
Where do bunnies live?	in dens underground called warrens	draw pictures of a warren
What do bunnies look like?	look at pictures of different types of bunnies	some sort of represational project- paper plate bunnies, drawing bunnies, etc...
What are baby bunnies called? How are they different from adult bunnies?	a kit	puppets? bring in bunnies to pet
How do bunnies move?	They hop!	Hop like bunnies at circle time Paint the children's feet and have them hop along a length of butcher paper (use different colors to differentiate between the children)

Using these techniques, you can use any subject to create a developmentally appropriate curriculum.