Integrating Science

We talk a lot about the crowded curriculum and trying to squeeze in all the essential learning areas and one way to try and get a good coverage is the integrated topic... Let's do a unit on "the local beach" and we can then have social sciences (history and geography), science (sustainability, living world), art (sketching, painting, sculptures) as well as tikanga, literacy and maths, etc...  Then schools get facilitators (like me!) coming along and talking about how students are arriving at colleges not understanding big ideas about science, or even that they have ever done science! We encourage schools to ensure that students know they're doing science and that in science, we have a particular way of sharing ideas, carrying out investigations and communicating with others.

Although this would seem like two completely different ideas, I believe that we can have a lovely integrated topic and keep the science focus (or health or social sciences...) as well. I love the idea of authentic contexts and I think it enables students with all their different learning styles and passions to be engaged and enthusiastic -a six week science unit on "birds of the beach" will certainly interest me but may not be so interesting to everyone else! A six week unit where students are doing some science: counting the birds, observing their behaviour, investigating them further at school using the internet and books and then confirming back at the beach; as well as art: painting landscapes, the waves or whatever arty people like to do (!) may engage all students.

Particularly in the Year 5 to 8 classes, reading and writing may disappear and those literacy spaces become an area for authentic contexts where students are still learning those skills but within, for example, the topic of beaches:

• Visual Language: critiquing the warning signs at the beach, 
• Writing: describing the life of the beach both poetically and scientifically (they are different!), poetry, summarising data gathered,
• Reading: DoC websites, local resources (might be newspaper articles, websites or pamphlets) and school journals

I'm sure you can come up with many more ideas. Even within these times, I might still be reminding students that, if it is summarising data, we need to be careful with the language we use since we are writing a piece that reflects scientific thinking or communicating. If we're debating, it might have a bit of science writing and some argumentative themes too. If I am writing something poetic, I might remind students that in this context, we have more leeway, and we can use metaphors and adjectives as well as making sure that we are eliciting an emotional response in our readers. The same goes with reading... If it's an article, it should have a particular way of communicating ideas with the way it is written and the words used. I like to use the local papers and cut out letters and articles for students to read and critique.

I hope as you have read through this post, you can see the science capabilities or the nature of science shining through... By ensuring that I'm keeping that science label prominent, I'm hoping that students moving on to high school will understand how we investigate in science, how we communicate, and how we critique. Students are also aware that science is much more that "blowing things up" (and yes, I even got that description again last week!). They will be developing that science lens right alongside other lenses.

I'd also like to share about how I'd have the Key Competencies and Values right at the top of my planning running the whole unit but I think I'll leave that for another day!

I hope this helps -it would be a great topic to discuss in a staff meeting and I would have the Essence Statements in the NZC (p. 17) open to ensure that curriculum areas don't get diluted. It's something that I constantly wrestled with when I was teaching -I often wrestled with reading programmes that were completely disconnected with whatever topic I was currently playing with.

Have a great week, feel free to comment below!

Paul