I think integrating curriculum is a wonderful approach to teaching and something that I have set a goal to do better in the upcoming school year and years to come. Through reading Teaching the Best Practice Way by Daniels and Bizar and Meeting Standards Through Integrated Curriculum by Drake and Burns, I am even more excited about this approach. Both books discuss how to integrate curriculum and share thoughts and ideas about the integration process. One thing that truly appeals to me is how the focus should be on authentic instruction and making learning meaningful for students.
Creating and implementing a theme-based unit, a unit of instruction that crosses a variety of content areas and focuses on centralized topic, would be an example of an integrated curriculum approach (Drake and Burns). Just imagine, a third grade teacher (such as myself) creating a theme-based unit about community and focusing it on facts about her students local community. The teacher takes that time to explore the community in which her students live in order to find out what's relevant to the area as far as weather, important landmarks, and community workers (students could also explore these areas). Next, the teacher creates a unit that combines math, science, reading, social studies, music, art, etc... Ideas that come to mind, for this unit, are having the students: create maps of the local community that include important and/or historical landmarks (social studies, math, and art); collect weather data through measuring daily temperatures at different times of the day and keeping data tables that would be graphed (science and math); and using what they've read and explored dealing their community and community workers to create a song that shares their new gained knowledge (reading and math).There are a lot of other ideas that come to mind but these are just a few to help explain how the wheels in my brain are turning about integrating curriculum.
It seems to me that there as so many possibilities out there for teachers to grasp on to and I want to be one of them. All I can say now is... Let the planning and exploration begin!
I think that the way you are describing teaching sounds much more interesting than the way we are currently teaching in a lot of our classrooms. I hope we get the courage, and the energy, to try this more often in the future.
ReplyDeleteThat is vey important and as teachers we sometimes forget to make things relevant to students. My principal says bring things to there speed, why teach over their heads? I hope we can get back to the exploration days, and get back to when teaching meant the whole child.
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