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PDI-9—One-Day Work Session: It's not JUST Science: Integration across the Elementary Curriculum

Wednesday, April 10, 2013
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Salon H, Marriott Rivercenter Hotel
Cost: $100
Limit: 80
Grades: K–6

Provider: Center for Educational Outreach, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas

Framing Questions / Outcomes

1. How does integrating science with other subject areas increase student interest and engagement, and provide opportunities for students to examine numerical data, learn about related social issues, and use written and spoken language in the context of real world situations?
2. What are practical strategies for adapting existing science lessons to address a variety of content areas, including reading/language arts, social studies and mathematics?
3. How can real world science topics, such as global atmospheric change, microorganisms and disease, genetics, or learning and memory, be used as themes to build students’ knowledge about patterns, cause and effect, and other crosscutting concepts?
4. How does an integrated curriculum contribute to the development of students' 21st century skills, such as systems thinking and non-routine problem solving?
5. How can naturalist journals be used to develop students' observational, reading and writing skills, across a variety of science topics?

Session Summary

Science often is squeezed out of the crowded elementary school curriculum. How can busy educators solve this problem? One approach is to integrate science instruction with other subject areas such as reading, writing, mathematics and social studies. We will work through a variety of science examples that demonstrate how a single topic, such as water cycles in a local watershed, can be used to teach about crosscutting concepts, such as cause and effect, and flows/cycles of energy and matter; in addition to covering reading/language arts, social science and even ethics. Topics will be addressed through inquiry-based, hands-on investigations with integrated mathematics and reading content that encompass many of the practices of science outlined in the framework for the Next Generation Science Standards as well as practices in the Common Core State Standards. We will use previously developed units as models on how to integrate science into other elementary school subject areas. Attendees will participate in guided inquiry lessons in physical, life and earth science, and will learn how to expand the lessons to include key concepts and skills in other disciplines. In addition, participants will learn how to create and implement new integrated instructional models based on their own locally relevant science topics, gain practice in identifying education standards across disciplines that can be addressed through such integrated science instruction, and how to create and use naturalist journals to increase students' observational (quantitative and qualitative) and language skills. Each participant will receive a complete unit set of printed interdisciplinary teaching materials.

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Nancy P. Moreno describes this session:

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