WEBVTT 00:00:00.410 --> 00:00:02.630 We're getting to the pointy end people. 00:00:02.660 --> 00:00:06.380 It's almost time to go back to school here in the Southern hemisphere. 00:00:06.770 --> 00:00:09.950 And I know that if you're anything like me, you were starting to think 00:00:09.950 --> 00:00:14.000 about your lesson plans, you're tying to think about the curriculum, 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:16.059 the timetable, and most importantly 00:00:16.059 --> 00:00:18.350 you're thinking, how the hell are you going to fit it all in? 00:00:18.380 --> 00:00:23.669 You've got to teach maths, English, science history, art 00:00:23.700 --> 00:00:28.279 and digital technology, design and technology, religion, health. 00:00:28.489 --> 00:00:32.449 The list goes on and on, not even mentioned all the skills, right. 00:00:33.529 --> 00:00:37.519 So, let me tell you something, the only way you are going to get through, 00:00:37.519 --> 00:00:42.379 being able to teach that entire curriculum is if you integrate, you've 00:00:42.379 --> 00:00:44.749 got to teach across the curriculum. 00:00:44.809 --> 00:00:50.629 In other words, Instead of teaching in silos, which if you listened to last 00:00:50.629 --> 00:00:56.910 week's episode with Daniel Burton, from, Educated by Nature, Daniel was 00:00:56.910 --> 00:01:01.020 talking about how he's found that one problem that educators seem to 00:01:01.050 --> 00:01:02.969 have is that they teach in silos. 00:01:02.969 --> 00:01:05.609 My goodness it's no wonder we're burning out. 00:01:06.150 --> 00:01:08.190 You're never going to get through the curriculum. 00:01:08.699 --> 00:01:11.310 There's no point in teaching in silos. 00:01:11.340 --> 00:01:11.940 Why? 00:01:12.340 --> 00:01:13.500 A there's too much? 00:01:13.770 --> 00:01:15.359 Burnout is imminent. 00:01:15.930 --> 00:01:20.250 And B children then struggled to make connections between the different subject 00:01:20.250 --> 00:01:22.139 areas, because life is integrated. 00:01:22.139 --> 00:01:24.720 We have to teach it in an integrated manner. 00:01:25.199 --> 00:01:26.130 So, what does that mean? 00:01:26.850 --> 00:01:30.360 It means, that perhaps you start with either your science, 00:01:30.449 --> 00:01:32.100 or humanities curriculum. 00:01:32.550 --> 00:01:35.220 You have a look at what you've got to teach them in science 00:01:35.320 --> 00:01:37.109 or humanities this term. 00:01:38.310 --> 00:01:40.199 Take a science topic, for example. 00:01:40.919 --> 00:01:45.389 You most probably, if you are in year two, for example, you're going to 00:01:45.389 --> 00:01:49.080 want, even in your one, your start, even in pre-primary, it would just be 00:01:49.080 --> 00:01:51.600 really, really, really, really simple. 00:01:52.109 --> 00:01:53.609 But you might want to. 00:01:54.120 --> 00:01:57.120 Draw something you might want to label it. 00:01:57.150 --> 00:01:59.789 These are all part of the English curriculum, right? 00:02:00.419 --> 00:02:02.070 You want to write a report. 00:02:02.490 --> 00:02:05.760 And so you know that you're going to want these kids to write a report, 00:02:05.789 --> 00:02:09.539 or maybe you want to write them to write a procedural text about whatever 00:02:09.539 --> 00:02:10.920 it is that you're doing in science. 00:02:12.120 --> 00:02:13.290 Or in humanities. 00:02:14.070 --> 00:02:20.400 And so what you decide to do in English, is you teach them explicitly 00:02:20.610 --> 00:02:25.290 direct explicit instruction, how to write a procedure. 00:02:26.670 --> 00:02:30.380 And when you're teaching that procedure don't make it on, I 00:02:30.410 --> 00:02:32.270 dunno, how do I make a cupcake? 00:02:32.870 --> 00:02:36.320 Well, you can, but why do you want to make your life difficult? 00:02:36.860 --> 00:02:40.910 Because if you teaching a science thing, on, let's see, 00:02:40.910 --> 00:02:42.620 maybe it's chemical sciences, 00:02:42.980 --> 00:02:46.040 then you can teach how to make a cupcake because maybe you're 00:02:46.040 --> 00:02:47.930 teaching on how materials change. 00:02:48.170 --> 00:02:53.030 So what happens when you actually mix flour and water and eggs and sugar, these 00:02:53.030 --> 00:02:57.740 individual ingredients, what happens to them when you mix them all together? 00:02:58.310 --> 00:02:58.700 Right. 00:02:59.480 --> 00:03:01.490 What do we call all those terms? 00:03:01.490 --> 00:03:04.510 Like emulsifying or whatever it might be. 00:03:05.110 --> 00:03:07.960 So you thinking, okay, I'm going to write this procedure, 00:03:08.200 --> 00:03:10.930 so I'm going to teach children procedural writing. 00:03:11.440 --> 00:03:15.040 And in your procedural writing, you are going to choose a topic 00:03:15.190 --> 00:03:19.570 that is specifically linked to your science or your HaSS curriculum, so 00:03:19.570 --> 00:03:22.390 that you can teach that vocabulary. 00:03:22.570 --> 00:03:27.220 So that you can teach the exact structure with subheadings that you might need. 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:33.970 So that way, not only are you teaching this English skill 00:03:34.150 --> 00:03:39.019 explicitly, when children then go off and they doing their Science 00:03:39.360 --> 00:03:43.380 they can then perhaps , you want to give them autonomy, so maybe they choose 00:03:43.380 --> 00:03:48.100 their own , materials that they are going to mix together and create something. 00:03:48.100 --> 00:03:50.800 Maybe they are going to create slime, maybe gonna make porridge, maybe 00:03:50.800 --> 00:03:51.760 they are going to make granola. 00:03:51.820 --> 00:03:54.100 Maybe they're going to make play-Doh. 00:03:54.940 --> 00:03:57.370 And so they are going to create a procedure for this. 00:03:58.210 --> 00:04:00.250 And so now they can go back. 00:04:00.760 --> 00:04:07.150 Looking at the procedure that they wrote step-by-step with you when you did your, 00:04:07.360 --> 00:04:14.900 how to make a cupcake, for example, and they going to apply that exact method to 00:04:14.900 --> 00:04:19.400 their own procedure of writing, whatever it is that they creating or making. 00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:21.560 Now, what else do you do? 00:04:22.340 --> 00:04:28.340 In your guided reading groups, you're going to find material nonfiction 00:04:28.340 --> 00:04:32.780 texts on this exact same subject. 00:04:32.780 --> 00:04:36.330 Let's say you're learning about the water cycle or it could be, 00:04:36.330 --> 00:04:38.250 changing matter and materials. 00:04:39.120 --> 00:04:43.060 There are loads of sites, there's Cool Australia, there's I love the American 00:04:43.060 --> 00:04:49.020 site A-Z Readers, there's all sorts of, resources and readers and texts 00:04:49.039 --> 00:04:53.960 that you can find, you can perhaps just make a photocopy out of a nonfiction 00:04:53.960 --> 00:04:55.400 book that you've got in the library. 00:04:55.400 --> 00:04:57.469 Just photocopy one or two pages. 00:04:57.469 --> 00:05:00.440 Remember you call you a lot of photocopy, a whole book, and use 00:05:00.440 --> 00:05:06.950 those pages, to teach children, not only you going over the topic of what 00:05:06.950 --> 00:05:11.570 you're learning, but you're going to teach them comprehension strategies. 00:05:11.780 --> 00:05:14.090 You're going to teach them how to look for those key words. 00:05:14.330 --> 00:05:18.080 You're going to teach them how to find the main idea of the text. 00:05:18.440 --> 00:05:22.379 You're going to teach them how to, their reading and they're standing 00:05:22.379 --> 00:05:26.070 out of their words, how to construct a sentence, whatever it might be. 00:05:26.490 --> 00:05:30.120 But you going to do it with texts, that are linked to your science 00:05:30.120 --> 00:05:32.909 curriculum so that you're teaching them 00:05:32.909 --> 00:05:39.179 content, you're giving them understanding, and at the same time, you are ticking 00:05:39.179 --> 00:05:43.109 off those skills that are necessary for reading and comprehension. 00:05:43.169 --> 00:05:44.039 Does that make sense? 00:05:45.179 --> 00:05:45.510 Now. 00:05:45.989 --> 00:05:50.640 You might also be thinking well, okay, sometimes math doesn't come in everywhere. 00:05:50.880 --> 00:05:55.710 I'll give you an example from my own class when we were planting 00:05:55.710 --> 00:05:58.710 seeds, we're planting beans, or I don't remember whatever they were 00:06:00.179 --> 00:06:01.679 and it was before the holidays. 00:06:02.400 --> 00:06:06.909 And so we measured them with those one centimeter cubes. 00:06:06.909 --> 00:06:10.379 Right, you know, the ones that stick into one another, what are they called? 00:06:10.449 --> 00:06:11.329 Unifix cubes. 00:06:12.169 --> 00:06:14.059 And then the kids, of course they recorded it. 00:06:14.059 --> 00:06:19.109 So they took a photograph with their unifix cubes beside their 00:06:19.139 --> 00:06:23.239 little plant that they grew, or that they were busy growing and let's say 00:06:23.239 --> 00:06:25.829 it was, I know five unifix cubes high. 00:06:25.929 --> 00:06:28.239 They recorded that in their math scrapbook. 00:06:28.299 --> 00:06:29.260 They put the picture there. 00:06:29.270 --> 00:06:30.440 We went off on holiday. 00:06:30.469 --> 00:06:31.340 We came back. 00:06:31.820 --> 00:06:35.060 We remeasured the plant, they took another photograph and maybe this 00:06:35.060 --> 00:06:37.610 time it was eight unifix cubes long. 00:06:38.080 --> 00:06:39.620 Put the photograph eight cubes. 00:06:39.980 --> 00:06:44.780 And then what we did was we spoke about that mathematical language of difference. 00:06:45.890 --> 00:06:46.730 And we said, well, okay 00:06:46.730 --> 00:06:48.050 so what is the difference? 00:06:48.350 --> 00:06:48.800 What? 00:06:49.280 --> 00:06:55.010 The difference in height between before we went away on our holidays and now? 00:06:55.430 --> 00:07:01.310 And that's how I introduced the concept of difference and subtraction in mathematics. 00:07:01.460 --> 00:07:06.380 With a real world experience of them planting their beans or whatever plants 00:07:06.410 --> 00:07:09.890 they would decided to grow because they didn't all grow the same ones. 00:07:10.400 --> 00:07:14.480 And how they could then see that they could actually measure 00:07:14.600 --> 00:07:17.460 those same plants in real life. 00:07:17.850 --> 00:07:19.200 And we then saw, oh, okay. 00:07:19.230 --> 00:07:23.130 We take the biggest amount, if you got to two unifix rows of cubes 00:07:23.130 --> 00:07:25.500 beside each other, It becomes so easy. 00:07:25.500 --> 00:07:29.100 You can see the seven and the five and there's two different, whatever it is. 00:07:29.670 --> 00:07:32.160 And you then learn that seven takeaway five. 00:07:32.800 --> 00:07:33.120 Two. 00:07:33.480 --> 00:07:36.490 And then you have the difference, the difference is two. 00:07:37.260 --> 00:07:38.520 Did I say seven and five? 00:07:38.520 --> 00:07:39.030 I hope so. 00:07:40.170 --> 00:07:41.610 So that's what I'm trying to tell you. 00:07:42.060 --> 00:07:48.570 As you sit down and you start planning your learning experiences for this 00:07:48.570 --> 00:07:53.580 term, for these few weeks, and by the way, if you're new in a class, 00:07:53.909 --> 00:07:57.210 take time, take these weeks to actually just to get to know the 00:07:57.210 --> 00:08:00.590 kids, get to know their strengths, get to know their areas of weakness. 00:08:00.590 --> 00:08:02.240 Get to know them personally. 00:08:02.630 --> 00:08:06.230 What they might be struggling with, you know, their families. 00:08:06.560 --> 00:08:09.080 You need to do all that before you can even start. 00:08:09.650 --> 00:08:11.360 So take a deep breath. 00:08:11.420 --> 00:08:15.830 You don't need to panic and get to know the kids first. 00:08:16.430 --> 00:08:20.930 And you get to know the best by doing hands on activities. 00:08:21.650 --> 00:08:22.670 For the love of all things 00:08:22.670 --> 00:08:28.550 holy set yourself a challenge this year to try and teach as much 00:08:28.550 --> 00:08:31.010 as possible without technology. 00:08:31.910 --> 00:08:35.840 And I'm going to be doing more episodes on this because just today 00:08:36.350 --> 00:08:38.390 I saw another really disturbing clip. 00:08:39.330 --> 00:08:45.630 The trend worldwide and in Australia is that children in terms of our 00:08:45.690 --> 00:08:51.000 academic performance in English, reading, writing, spelling, and 00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:54.900 math and science is going down. 00:08:55.560 --> 00:08:57.780 And so governments, education 00:08:57.780 --> 00:09:01.020 department's are all scrambling, you know, why is this what's happening? 00:09:01.050 --> 00:09:01.950 Well, Hey, hello. 00:09:01.950 --> 00:09:06.930 Have you noticed the trend that it seems to go totally in line with when you 00:09:06.930 --> 00:09:09.780 gave kids a one-on-one iPad program. 00:09:11.040 --> 00:09:15.750 And that also, by the way, it goes hand in hand with the emotional, social, 00:09:15.750 --> 00:09:17.700 emotional decline of our children. 00:09:18.090 --> 00:09:21.930 It also goes hand in hand with the fact that children are struggling to hold a 00:09:21.930 --> 00:09:26.610 pencil and write because their core, and their gross motor skills are ill developed 00:09:26.610 --> 00:09:28.440 because they no longer play outside. 00:09:29.910 --> 00:09:31.200 There's a correlation. 00:09:31.560 --> 00:09:37.950 And I think that is a real challenge now for educators, even on my blog, I have so 00:09:37.950 --> 00:09:46.580 many articles there and that I've linked to evidence and research of what the 00:09:46.610 --> 00:09:51.560 have found in terms of how technology is affecting growing, developing brains 00:09:51.560 --> 00:09:53.570 and what we should be doing instead. 00:09:54.080 --> 00:09:54.500 Okay. 00:09:54.560 --> 00:09:55.550 So that's one thing. 00:09:55.940 --> 00:10:01.370 So as you set about planning your units for the next few weeks and this term. 00:10:02.330 --> 00:10:06.140 Maybe try and do them with a little technology as possible. 00:10:06.200 --> 00:10:07.340 Get real books. 00:10:07.900 --> 00:10:13.820 Don't watch them on YouTube because, actually I've got a blog post about that. 00:10:13.970 --> 00:10:17.420 The research shows that there's too much distraction and children actually 00:10:17.420 --> 00:10:20.550 don't focus on that very much on the understanding of it because their 00:10:20.550 --> 00:10:24.050 brains focus more on the pictures, flicking in the lights and stuff. 00:10:24.910 --> 00:10:27.490 And number two, make life for yourself easier. 00:10:28.240 --> 00:10:32.800 Go and have a look, draw your mind map of where you can start with 00:10:32.830 --> 00:10:37.870 either Science or Hass and how you can integrate activities and experiences 00:10:38.020 --> 00:10:46.120 into that using picture books, using hands on learning, and going outside. 00:10:46.150 --> 00:10:49.420 And I'm sure that from last week's episode with Daniel, you would have 00:10:49.420 --> 00:10:55.240 noticed just how important it is for children to be outside and how beneficial 00:10:55.240 --> 00:10:59.530 it is not just for the academic performance, but for social, emotional 00:10:59.530 --> 00:11:03.850 learning, their resilience, their ability to focus and a whole bunch more. 00:11:04.450 --> 00:11:05.080 Now, listen. 00:11:05.500 --> 00:11:11.710 I do have a free resource for you to help you to plan integrated units of work. 00:11:12.010 --> 00:11:16.320 And I will put a link to that free resource, a free planning tool, 00:11:16.440 --> 00:11:20.790 a template, that you can use to plan cross-curricular learning 00:11:20.790 --> 00:11:26.610 experiences for your students as you start your new term of teaching. 00:11:27.090 --> 00:11:28.410 So I hope that you found this. 00:11:29.070 --> 00:11:33.240 A little bit inspiring and it's given you some thing to think about and some 00:11:33.240 --> 00:11:35.220 food for thought as you go forward. 00:11:35.880 --> 00:11:39.870 Hey, and if anything I've said today resonates with you, or you think 00:11:39.870 --> 00:11:44.010 that I'm onto something, or you just like my content in general. 00:11:44.370 --> 00:11:46.620 You like to listen to crazy old woman going on and on. 00:11:47.370 --> 00:11:48.990 Give me a follow subscribe. 00:11:49.530 --> 00:11:53.910 That way you'll be notified every single time a new episode is published. 00:11:54.720 --> 00:11:59.900 And if you want to get onto my subscriber list, . I'll put a link in the show notes 00:11:59.930 --> 00:12:02.300 that you can subscribe to get curious. 00:12:02.570 --> 00:12:04.490 My weekly newsletter. 00:12:04.880 --> 00:12:07.160 Thanks for being here I really appreciated. 00:12:07.160 --> 00:12:11.180 I know that you can listen to a million other podcasts, but you chose this one. 00:12:11.390 --> 00:12:12.770 And so thank you for being here. 00:12:12.800 --> 00:12:14.090 I really appreciate you. 00:12:14.300 --> 00:12:17.150 Have a lovely day and I look forward to being, and spending 00:12:17.150 --> 00:12:19.160 time with you again next week.