Hey, What's The Big Idea?

So I have been busy for the last few weeks getting ready to roll out some CC units for our second and third grade teachers. Not an easy task for an old kindergarten teacher. The big buzz is learning how to backward plan when doing your unit lesson designs. Teachers need a true understanding of some new terms. The Big Idea is a statement that crosses disciplines and allows students to have a deeper understanding of the content being taught. They need to be able to apply this to their own lives. Wow! That changes the game big time and will be far more demanding for teachers to develop. Essential questions lead students to the Big Idea as they learn the content of the unit of study. Teachers will help students to formulate answers to essential questions as they read both fiction and non fiction and hold collaborative discussions. That was a mouthful. How will this look in kindergarten? I am moving on to that next. We need to keep Big Idea and Essential questions in kid friendly language. Collaboration is a huge piece of  Common Core and our kids will need practice with this over time. 
I made this Big Idea statement on 81/2" X 14" paper and gave them essential questions with nice backgrounds to make this a bit more exciting. It will be fun to create these for each unit so teachers can put them up in their room and refer back to them as needed...