Running head: INTERGRATION OF MATH AND SCIENCE 1

Content Knowledge in Interdisciplinary Curriculum

Ashia Brown

Regent University

Author Note

In partial fulfillment of UED 495 Field Experience ePortfolio, Spring 2018

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Content Knowledge in Interdisciplinary Curriculum

The demands in equipping young scholars with a twenty-first century education has

continued to increase, as our world presents new “need to know” skill that must be taught in the

classroom. With the push to equip our students both academically and socially, teachers face one

conundrum. As educational goals increase, the time within the classroom remains the same. So

how is an educator expected to fulfill each daily objective? The answer is content integration. By

integrating two or more content areas teachers provided their students with the opportunity to get

a deeper understanding of the content which allows students to experience the learning process in

a more authentic way. Not only does content integration significantly benefits students but also

teacher in that it allows teacher to accomplished more within their limited school days.

Rational for Selection of Artifacts

The artifacts that I chose to demonstrate my competence in content knowledge in

interdisciplinary curriculum are all related to a first-grade math unit in graphing that correlates to

Virginia standard of learning (SOL) 1.14 and a science unit about the weather which correlates to

the Virginia science SOL 1.7. My artifacts display a variety of activities that the students

completed during this unit.

The first artifact that I have chosen to illustrate my competence is an introductory lesson

plan about weather. During this lesson students were introduced to thermometers and how they

work. I explained thermometer can be used for different things, but we were going to use our

thermometer to track the weather over the course of our new math unit and science unit. After

explaining and exploring the thermometers we began to review and discuss the four seasons. We

discussed how each season affected people, animals, plants, and the weather. During the course

of this unit the class created an anchor chart to display all the information that we learned during
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that day’s instructions. I made sure that students paid attention to what temperatures they would

experience during each season.

I chose this lesson plans because it temperatures are typically a math subject, but I

incorporated the bulk of my instructional input about temperatures into my science unit.

Nevertheless, the entire unit about season as incorporated into my math unit about graphing.

The second artifact that I have chosen is a collage of pictures of some of the activities

that the class completed during our integrated unit. The first picture is a daily class graph of the

weather. By combining the types of weather with a bar graph students were able to see how the

weather was something that they could track. This reinforced our math standard of collecting

data. Another picture displays students graphing booklets. During this activity students chose

topics that they wanted to collect data on. One of the topics was favorite season. This allowed

students to reflect on the four different season and validate their answers based on the

information they learned about each season in science. Included in the collage are also picture of

books that students read during independent reading time. Some of these books were chosen by

the teacher for small group reading, others where chosen by students who were curious to learn

more about the weather during specific season.

Reflection on Theory and Practice

One of the things that I learned while taking UED 405 Teaching Reading and Language

Arts Across the Curriculum, was the concept of thematic units (Tompkins, 2016). Thematic units

are interdisciplinary units that integrate reading and writing with social studies, science, math,

and other curricular areas (Tompkins, 2016). In many ways the science unit on weather could

have been a thematic unit. Weather was incorporated in Language arts during independent

reading time. It was incorporated in our writing time because students were required to complete
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a “My Season” booklet in which they wrote about what the weather is like in different seasons

and how it affects animal, people, and plants. It was also incorporated in math by graphing the

weather daily.

Interdisciplinary curriculum allows students to practice twenty-first century skills which

are a major focus in today’s classroom. During this unit student communicated and collaborated

to explore different weather tools and to complete surveys with varying topic. Students were also

encouraged to use critical thinking when writing about how weather affects animals, people, and

plants.

The importance of interdisciplinary curriculum has become evident over the last years

and has gained the attention of the nation. This attention has birth the Science, technology,

engineering, and math (STEM) and art (STEAM) programs. The integration of these programs

and concepts are relatively easy to do in the classroom. Interdisciplinary curriculum allows

teachers to focus on each student and how they learn. By presenting the information in different

ways, across the curriculum, students are provided the opportunity to learn and not memorize the

information. Interdisciplinary curriculum allows students to interact with the material in a

personal and meaningful way (Tucker &Hafenstein,1997). By integrating content instruction

educators engage students which supports a strong educational foundation and achievement.
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References

Tucker, B., & Hafenstein, N. L. (1997). An integrated-thematic curriculum for gifted

learners. Roeper Review, 19(4), 196.

Tompkins, G. E. (2016). Language arts: Patterns of practice. Boston: Pearson.

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