Integrated Curriculum

     Hello Blog friends! Long time no see, I hope all is well. We are back here today to speak about education, although I am starting to feel as though I am doing most of the speaking. I would like to talk to you today about Integrated Curriculum. Integrated Curriculum is a concept which works extremely well, but can be difficult to implement. To put shortly, The idea of integrated curriculum is to include a variety of different subjects into a single project or lesson, which accurately teaches the separate curricular material. By expressing to students the possible overlap between subjects they are able to understand the importance of each topic in a real world application as well as their relevance towards each other. The goal is that through this students will become more engaged in their education.
      An example of integrated curriculum applied in the classroom would be to have your students work on a project based on answering the question "Where is the best place in the world to live?" Obviously this question is partially opinionated so many different answers will arise. The objective is for students to research an area based on its geography, history, and several statistical based ideas to represent a variety of factors that are applicable. Through this students not only understand how these separate subjects can relate to each other but also direct their own learning withing the classroom.
      The reason that I am bringing up this topic is because I am currently doing a project based around Integrated Curriculum in my education class. This project consists of me working in a group to create a curriculum based around this concept. Through this project I have realized how difficult it is to create a large scale Integrated Curriculum, it is hardly a one man job. If schools are to implement this concept it will require a large amount of collaboration amongst their teachers, otherwise it may prove to be ineffective. There are many faults that exist within Integrated Curriculum if it is not planned well. One of these faults is the fact that some lessons may be overlooked. There are many concepts that the curriculum states is necessary for a student to know. Some of these concepts are compatible with other subjects, others are not. These concepts which may not be effective for Integrated Curriculum may be overlooked by teachers, and then the students will be unprepared when reaching higher levels of learning. Another factor that needs to be taken into account is that unless the teachers of a school are constantly in tune with each other and plan ahead, an integrated based project may become confusing and messy. It is important that teachers are consistently collaborating in order to make Integrated Curriculum effective.
    As mentioned earlier this only applies to larger scale ideas of Integrated Curriculum. There are much smaller scales that can be applied in individual classrooms, and if a school is not confident with changing their education practices this can also be effective. Examples of smaller scale ideas of Integrated Curriculum is an elementary classroom spelling a word, and then drawing a picture of that word and colouring it in. This simple activity combines art and spelling, and is extremely easy to carry out. Therefore although integrated curriculum can be a difficult accomplishment, it can prove to be very rewarding, even in the smallest of senses.