We're getting to the pointy end people.
It's almost time to go back to school here in the Southern hemisphere.
And I know that if you're anything like me, you were starting to think
about your lesson plans, you're tying to think about the curriculum,
the timetable, and most importantly
you're thinking, how the hell are you going to fit it all in?
You've got to teach maths, English, science history, art
and digital technology, design and technology, religion, health.
The list goes on and on, not even mentioned all the skills, right.
So, let me tell you something, the only way you are going to get through,
being able to teach that entire curriculum is if you integrate, you've
got to teach across the curriculum.
In other words, Instead of teaching in silos, which if you listened to last
week's episode with Daniel Burton, from, Educated by Nature, Daniel was
talking about how he's found that one problem that educators seem to
have is that they teach in silos.
My goodness it's no wonder we're burning out.
You're never going to get through the curriculum.
There's no point in teaching in silos.
Why?
A there's too much?
Burnout is imminent.
And B children then struggled to make connections between the different subject
areas, because life is integrated.
We have to teach it in an integrated manner.
So, what does that mean?
It means, that perhaps you start with either your science,
or humanities curriculum.
You have a look at what you've got to teach them in science
or humanities this term.
Take a science topic, for example.
You most probably, if you are in year two, for example, you're going to
want, even in your one, your start, even in pre-primary, it would just be
really, really, really, really simple.
But you might want to.
Draw something you might want to label it.
These are all part of the English curriculum, right?
You want to write a report.
And so you know that you're going to want these kids to write a report,
or maybe you want to write them to write a procedural text about whatever
it is that you're doing in science.
Or in humanities.
And so what you decide to do in English, is you teach them explicitly
direct explicit instruction, how to write a procedure.
And when you're teaching that procedure don't make it on, I
dunno, how do I make a cupcake?
Well, you can, but why do you want to make your life difficult?
Because if you teaching a science thing, on, let's see,
maybe it's chemical sciences,
then you can teach how to make a cupcake because maybe you're
teaching on how materials change.
So what happens when you actually mix flour and water and eggs and sugar, these
individual ingredients, what happens to them when you mix them all together?
Right.
What do we call all those terms?
Like emulsifying or whatever it might be.
So you thinking, okay, I'm going to write this procedure,
so I'm going to teach children procedural writing.
And in your procedural writing, you are going to choose a topic
that is specifically linked to your science or your HaSS curriculum, so
that you can teach that vocabulary.
So that you can teach the exact structure with subheadings that you might need.
So that way, not only are you teaching this English skill
explicitly, when children then go off and they doing their Science
they can then perhaps , you want to give them autonomy, so maybe they choose
their own , materials that they are going to mix together and create something.
Maybe they are going to create slime, maybe gonna make porridge, maybe
they are going to make granola.
Maybe they're going to make play-Doh.
And so they are going to create a procedure for this.
And so now they can go back.
Looking at the procedure that they wrote step-by-step with you when you did your,
how to make a cupcake, for example, and they going to apply that exact method to
their own procedure of writing, whatever it is that they creating or making.
Now, what else do you do?
In your guided reading groups, you're going to find material nonfiction
texts on this exact same subject.
Let's say you're learning about the water cycle or it could be,
changing matter and materials.
There are loads of sites, there's Cool Australia, there's I love the American
site A-Z Readers, there's all sorts of, resources and readers and texts
that you can find, you can perhaps just make a photocopy out of a nonfiction
book that you've got in the library.
Just photocopy one or two pages.
Remember you call you a lot of photocopy, a whole book, and use
those pages, to teach children, not only you going over the topic of what
you're learning, but you're going to teach them comprehension strategies.
You're going to teach them how to look for those key words.
You're going to teach them how to find the main idea of the text.
You're going to teach them how to, their reading and they're standing
out of their words, how to construct a sentence, whatever it might be.
But you going to do it with texts, that are linked to your science
curriculum so that you're teaching them
content, you're giving them understanding, and at the same time, you are ticking
off those skills that are necessary for reading and comprehension.
Does that make sense?
Now.
You might also be thinking well, okay, sometimes math doesn't come in everywhere.
I'll give you an example from my own class when we were planting
seeds, we're planting beans, or I don't remember whatever they were
and it was before the holidays.
And so we measured them with those one centimeter cubes.
Right, you know, the ones that stick into one another, what are they called?
Unifix cubes.
And then the kids, of course they recorded it.
So they took a photograph with their unifix cubes beside their
little plant that they grew, or that they were busy growing and let's say
it was, I know five unifix cubes high.
They recorded that in their math scrapbook.
They put the picture there.
We went off on holiday.
We came back.
We remeasured the plant, they took another photograph and maybe this
time it was eight unifix cubes long.
Put the photograph eight cubes.
And then what we did was we spoke about that mathematical language of difference.
And we said, well, okay
so what is the difference?
What?
The difference in height between before we went away on our holidays and now?
And that's how I introduced the concept of difference and subtraction in mathematics.
With a real world experience of them planting their beans or whatever plants
they would decided to grow because they didn't all grow the same ones.
And how they could then see that they could actually measure
those same plants in real life.
And we then saw, oh, okay.
We take the biggest amount, if you got to two unifix rows of cubes
beside each other, It becomes so easy.
You can see the seven and the five and there's two different, whatever it is.
And you then learn that seven takeaway five.
Two.
And then you have the difference, the difference is two.
Did I say seven and five?
I hope so.
So that's what I'm trying to tell you.
As you sit down and you start planning your learning experiences for this
term, for these few weeks, and by the way, if you're new in a class,
take time, take these weeks to actually just to get to know the
kids, get to know their strengths, get to know their areas of weakness.
Get to know them personally.
What they might be struggling with, you know, their families.
You need to do all that before you can even start.
So take a deep breath.
You don't need to panic and get to know the kids first.
And you get to know the best by doing hands on activities.
For the love of all things
holy set yourself a challenge this year to try and teach as much
as possible without technology.
And I'm going to be doing more episodes on this because just today
I saw another really disturbing clip.
The trend worldwide and in Australia is that children in terms of our
academic performance in English, reading, writing, spelling, and
math and science is going down.
And so governments, education
department's are all scrambling, you know, why is this what's happening?
Well, Hey, hello.
Have you noticed the trend that it seems to go totally in line with when you
gave kids a one-on-one iPad program.
And that also, by the way, it goes hand in hand with the emotional, social,
emotional decline of our children.
It also goes hand in hand with the fact that children are struggling to hold a
pencil and write because their core, and their gross motor skills are ill developed
because they no longer play outside.
There's a correlation.
And I think that is a real challenge now for educators, even on my blog, I have so
many articles there and that I've linked to evidence and research of what the
have found in terms of how technology is affecting growing, developing brains
and what we should be doing instead.
Okay.
So that's one thing.
So as you set about planning your units for the next few weeks and this term.
Maybe try and do them with a little technology as possible.
Get real books.
Don't watch them on YouTube because, actually I've got a blog post about that.
The research shows that there's too much distraction and children actually
don't focus on that very much on the understanding of it because their
brains focus more on the pictures, flicking in the lights and stuff.
And number two, make life for yourself easier.
Go and have a look, draw your mind map of where you can start with
either Science or Hass and how you can integrate activities and experiences
into that using picture books, using hands on learning, and going outside.
And I'm sure that from last week's episode with Daniel, you would have
noticed just how important it is for children to be outside and how beneficial
it is not just for the academic performance, but for social, emotional
learning, their resilience, their ability to focus and a whole bunch more.
Now, listen.
I do have a free resource for you to help you to plan integrated units of work.
And I will put a link to that free resource, a free planning tool,
a template, that you can use to plan cross-curricular learning
experiences for your students as you start your new term of teaching.
So I hope that you found this.
A little bit inspiring and it's given you some thing to think about and some
food for thought as you go forward.
Hey, and if anything I've said today resonates with you, or you think
that I'm onto something, or you just like my content in general.
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Thanks for being here I really appreciated.
I know that you can listen to a million other podcasts, but you chose this one.
And so thank you for being here.
I really appreciate you.
Have a lovely day and I look forward to being, and spending
time with you again next week.