Interdisciplinary Teaching

Since I am a multiple subjects teacher there are a lot of topics that I commonly teach. I decided to look in science and the third grade life sciences standard. This topic has to do with students knowing a variety of life forms that are in different environments. I wanted to see how I could incorporate art and music to help enrich student understanding.

The first resource that I found was through a blog on scholastic.com that has a list of different types of art projects relating to animal habitats.: http://blogs.scholastic.com/prek_k/2009/04/learning-about-habitats-rainforest.html

This resources showed students projects where they paint a desert habitat. This sparked my interest because I know that I could have different students pain different habitats. I could see turning this into a research project where students choose a habitat where they would describe it and include their own art work of that habitat. It also showed students molding animals for a particular habitat out of clay. The site said that some students painted background for their clay animal to sit in front of as part of a display. This are great ideas that I could use that would give my students a hands on and very visual way of learning about animals habitats.

The other idea that I had was to include music in our learning about animals environments. I found this great youtube site: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A473A82C5FB4D40 This page has a wide variety of songs that talk about where certain animals live and describing various habitats. It was great to find a place that a lot of songs that I could choose from. I could see my kids learning and singing some of these songs or even using them as background music while they worked on some of the art projects that I described above. Hopefully this can help to incorporate music into my teaching.

I think that there are so many values in interdisciplinary teaching. I as a multiple subjects teacher it feels almost impossible to fit every subject into every day. Since testing has put such an emphasis on language arts and math it can be more challenging to find time for other subjects like science and social studies. Being able to teach a lesson that incorporates two or more subjects seems like such an efficient use of time. I also think that it helps engage students when they do not like a particular subject. I know that some of my students do not really enjoy reading but when we are reading something that is science based some of them become more engaged. When you combine two subject areas you open the opportunities students have to connect and become interested in the lesson.

 It can however be extremely challenging to find time to write these kinds of lessons. It requires the teacher to have content knowledge in more than one area while teaching a single lesson. Finding interdisciplinary resources and making these types of lesson plans can be very time consuming. This is the exact reason why I have chosen interdisciplinary teaching for my capstone project. I know how hard it is to develop these types of materials so being able to complete this project and then use it in my classroom is something I am really looking forward to. 

I replied to Betsy Varellas's blog on movement in the classroom.