TITLE: Interdisciplinary Curriculum

Interdisciplinary Curriculum
Allison Whitson
Regent University

In partial fulfillment of UED 496 Field Experience ePortfolio, Fall 2015

Introduction
Interdisciplinary curriculum is when two or more subjects are combined seamlessly in
one lesson plan. It is very important to integrate in an elementary classroom. When students are
making connections from one subject to another, they are becoming engaged learners and this
leads to critical thinking, as all subjects are connected to each other. Through learning more on
how to read and comprehend what is read, students are more able to engage in scientific
discovery as they read more about science.
Rationale for Selection of Artifacts
For my kindergarten student teaching, I combined the subjects of reading and science into
a lesson plan by introducing a topic with a childrens book called It Looked like Spilt Milk. By
using questions to help students make predictions, I was able to ask students what they think will
happen next in the story. The story starts with all of these different shapes of animals and other

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things that say what it looks like, but it actually turns out to be spilt milk that looks like a shape.
By the end of the story, there was a shape of what actually was spilt milk, but it was actually a
cloud. At the end of the story, I asked the students some questions about why our prediction was
wrong at the end and the students concluded that we thought the last picture was spilt milk, but it
was actually just a cloud. The students then were able to make connections about the sequence of
events as I was able to use new vocabulary words like beginning, middle, and end. This aids the
students comprehension skills.
The second artifact was led straight from the spilt milk book. I started out with a saucer
of milk under the document camera and told the students that I have a saucer of milk. Then I
added a drop of each color of food coloring in the center of the saucer. I then took a Q-tip and
dap it in dish soap and quickly pulled it away. When I lifted the Q-tip up, the colors started
swirling together and after a few seconds, it stopped. It is a very popular activity for elementary
grades because it is very entertaining to watch different food dyes swirl together in milk just by
adding dish soap. The kindergartners were so surprised and fell in love with the activity. The
scientific part of the activity was about mixing colors and what the different mixes created when
combined. After we did the whole group lesson, the students went back to their seats to put
water-down food coloring drops on a coffee filter to practice combining colors and watching
what happens when the colors expand and mix across the paper.
Reflection Theory and Practice
In my Integrated Science class, I learned a lot about scientific discovery and how that ties
into so many other subjects, like reading, because there is so much to investigate within a story
or a piece of text. The traditional view of learning is that knowledge is discovered through the
manipulatives of objects or acquired from others when learners listen to what they say. However,
we now accept that learning is more complex than that. Knowledge cannot be passed intact from
a teacher or book to a learner, nor is it simply discovered in the real world. Students must

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construct new knowledge for themselves (Bass, p. 63, 2009). Through reading comprehension,
students can learn more about science by making predictions through scientific discovery and
through reading stories about science. Whether the discovery is just from colors mixing, it is still
important for kids to start making their own predictions and discoveries so they can be trained to
think like scientists when they get older. Kindergartners already know their colors, but some of
them do not always know what happens when colors are mixed. They also may not know how to
make good predictions and discover the effects of science on their own.
References
Bass, J., & Contant, T. (2009). Teaching science as inquiry (11th ed.). Columbus, Ohio:
Allyn & Bacon.