Cross-curricular planning

Meaningful integration deepens children’s understanding of the skills and concepts in each of the subjects that are involved.  Through meaningful integration, children can be encouraged to generate new connections and to explained their existing understanding.  Integration also helps children see how the knowledge and skills developed in one area can be relevant to other areas.

The Full-Day Early Learning-Kindergarten Program Draft Version 2010-2011 page 17

Throughout this series of blog posts I have talked about how slight changes sometimes need to be made in thinking and planning in order for these structures to be used in Kindergarten.  When it comes to cross-curriculuar planning this is an area that Kindergarten often leads the way!  We integrate everything.  Rarely is anything ever taught in isolation.  To give you an idea of how this looks let me explain some of the things that took place in the past couple of weeks in our classroom.  Since the focus of these posts is mathematics I will start with our math unit on sorting.  We read a number of books to introduce us to sorting:  A Lost Button  chapter in Frog and Toad are Friends, The Button Box, Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, and Sort it Out!  Lots of manipulative were put out in our Loose Parts Centre including big box of buttons.  When students started describing things by colours we started to study the primary colours in the visual arts centre and combine colours to create secondary colours (we also learned these words and added them to our word wall).  In our music lessons we were describing famous pieces of music by tempo – fast and slow, which connected to our movement in PE.  We had some local newspapers delivered and while learning about what a newspaper is (Media Literacy) we cut out picture of pumpkins and faces and sorted them.  Finally in science we cut open those pumpkins and sorted different types of pumpkin seeds, squash seeds and sunflower seeds.  Every different subject in our class was integrated making it more meaningful and engaging for our students!