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In the Basic School Network, Core Commonalities provide fertile ground for the development of young minds.
At Jackson-Keller Elementary School in San Antonio, Texas, Kristy Herrera points to a familiar chart on the wall.
"Which of these Core Commonalities has the most to do with weather?" she asks her 2nd grade class.
"Connections to Nature?" a child responds. "Good," says Kristy. "Any others?"
"The Use of Symbols?"
"Response to the Aesthetic?"
The class goes on to form a weather unit based on those underlying themes. The children assemble a slide show of paintings depicting weather scenes. The first one is "Tornado Over Kansas." They discuss references to weather in classical and contemporary music; research weather issues in the broadcast media and on a CD-ROM program; perform their own weather forecasts, using symbols to show the location of storms on a map; and develop a pamphlet on tornado safety procedures. They conduct experiments on rainfall and evaporation and make up imaginative stories about the cloud formations they observed. When they finish the unit, the children have done much more than just learn about the weather.
Jackson-Keller Elementary is one of a cohort of 21 schools nationwide that currently comprise the Basic School Network,' which, for the past three years, has been using Core Commonalities as the basis for developing the unique potential of every child in the classroom.
An Adaptable Basis for Coherent Curriculums
The Basic School Network, funded by the Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation and housed at James Madison University in Virginia, implements the Basic School concept set forth by the renowned educator Ernest L. Boyer. In 1995, in his last and perhaps most influential work, The Basic School: A Community,for Learning,2 the late president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching introduced the Core Commonalities-a system of eight themes that underlie all human experience-as part of an overall proposal for renewing the earliest years of learning.
The following are eight core commonalities:
* The Life Cycle
* The Use of Symbols
* Membership in Groups
* A Sense of Time and Space
* Response to the Aesthetic
* Connections to Nature
* Producing and Consuming
* Living with Purpose Boyer envisioned the Core Commonalities as a framework for integrated thematic...