A group of kindergarteners and fellow first graders turned one school hallway into a forest as they endeavored to learn about animals and science inquiry. Not just any mural, this culmination of a month-long project was based on observing, questioning, asking field trips, conducting library research (including the internet) and asking experts. The students developed skills in forming questions about what they thought they Knew, Wanted to know, and had Learned (K-W-L). This project showed that very young learners can do science—and do it well.
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In this article, we describe an interdisciplinary, activity-based lesson plan implemented in a third/fourth-grade classroom. During these activities, students use musical concepts to think about, illustrate, and discuss animal behavior, and they use scientific concepts to motivate musical composition and performance.
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Learning makes more sense and is retained when it has a context and connection to other knowledge. We know this from a wealth of sources: research, our experiences as students—and as teachers. We remember things that have a rich set of connections. Teaching that is too focused in one context is much less likely to be transferred to other contexts. If one of our goals is to develop our students into critical, reflective thinkers, we have to extend skills and knowledge across the traditional content areas.
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A group of pre-service students assigned to fifth graders with an interest in tornadoes worked over the course of several classes to present a series of lessons that gave students a solid background so they could understand how tornadoes are formed. Creating the tornado would be the students’ experiment, not the teachers’. This form of facilitation—in which the teacher poses the question but lets the students decide how to answer the question—falls into the guided-inquiry approach. In this approach, often times the process is more important than the final product.
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English Language Learners (ELL) are capable of high levels of conceptual understanding related to science. However, traditional means of assessment do not typically reflect their understanding of science content. We found through classroom observation and analysis of student products that while ELL students have difficulty writing in English, they can speak about science with a level of sophistication not reflected on written assignments. This mismatch between assessment practices and student understanding is what motivated us as teacher researchers to assess fourth- and fifth-grade understanding of marine environments through drawings.
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Interdisciplinary instruction is a way of approaching curriculum by organizing content and processes from more than one discipline around a central theme, issue, problem, topic, or experience (Jacobs 1989). Teachers can start the process of designing interdisciplinary units by examining the standards in different curricular areas and finding commonalities. One place to start is with the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996) unifying themes. The unifying themes (e.g., systems, change, models), as well as connected tools (e.g., measurement, representations), and shared processes (e.g., observing, predicting) are places for making meaningful curricular connections across disciplines.
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Recognizing that many issues of Science and Children contain helpful and varied examples of science integration that might be pertinent to a particular classroom setting, we decided to compile an annotated bibliography using issues from the last 12 years. Initially, we generated this list to help the students in our teacher education program in integrating science with the other content areas during their student teaching experiences, but we think the list would be useful to any teacher interested in achieving more seamless integration in their classroom and decided to share it here.
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You often will hear that physics, chemistry, biology, and Earth science have a lot in common. In fact, many science curriculum programs stress how these disciplines are integrated and have common concepts and themes. More evidence of this integration comes from the fact that one can study and do research in biochemistry, biophysics, geophysics, and all sorts of other “cross-field” undertakings. So yes, the different disciplines can have a lot in common.
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Science and art are both creative ways of understanding the world and representing what we have come to know about it. The concrete, tangible aspects of art often provide a venue for students to convey their grasp of scientific knowledge, such as creating models of living organisms. This lesson illustrates one opportunity for combining art and science to improve student understanding of scientific ideas.
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One solution to the common challenge of teaching physical science for teachers who are not confident with the subject matter or comfortable with the material is inquiry based science centers. Science centers can engage students; accommodate different learning styles and individual interests; help students become independent and confident learners; and encourage social skills among students. One third-grade teacher worked with students as they completed activities at learning centers during a week-long unit on simple machines.
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One of the shortcomings in most efforts to integrate art and science is that many of us have a shallow understanding of art, which inevitably leads to shallow connections between art and science. Coloring drawings of planets, building sculptures of volcanoes, and decorating scientific diagrams are fine activities, but they do not link science and art in powerful ways. One way to more deeply connect art and science is to consider art in its more broad form—aesthetics, and in this case, the sublime.
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Can you measure a dog’s tail in dog biscuits? Can you measure a desk without a ruler? Which is better: measuring a room in paces or meters? Which system of measurement do scientists use? This month’s column explores these questions and more to help learners understand why we use standard systems of measurement.
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Science and art go hand-in-hand, as scientists make art to share their observations. Two scientists who are widely known first as artists are Leonardo de Vinci, anatomist and inventor, and Beatrix Potter, mycologist. Both of these scientists used observations of the natural world as the springboard for their discoveries.

Young children like to paint and draw and are learning that they can make representations and share their stories with artwork. Use your students’ interest in drawing to teach about recording and sharing scientific observations. Making observations about living things is part of the National Science Education Content Standards A and C for grades K–4.
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