Wrapping Up The Integration

For the past month, the Junior school have been learning through an integrated unit about the Olympics, which I previously discussed with reference to my Year 10 PE class. I also blogged about the sketchnotes the Year 9's were completing in SOS about the Olympic values. This week has been about bring the integrated unit to a close.

The students task, was to use all of their knowledge and skills they developed throughout the unit across all subjects to create a website. For some parameters around the site, students had headings to shape their ideas; society, anthem, kai, and an athlete from the country their group was recognised as, and also a description and evaluation of their game they created in PE.

Today the students presented the website they created and explored some of the key knowledge they had learnt throughout the creation of the site. I was interested to see how students collaborated with one another, and utilised their skills/knowledge across subjects, rather than keeping math in math for example. Unfortunately I was sick while the students created their sites, but I was thankful to see some of their presentations.

For future integrated units, I think the teachers need to begin to brainstorm, plan and create lessons much earlier. Possibly there could be overall aims of the unit - what we actually want the students to get out of it (not the final product they produce, but the major objectives), I think this integrated unit was possibly left a little too open, which many of us struggled with. We also need to be clear on whether we are teaching our own subjects, or whether we have daily objectives we all work towards, to create some collaboration and cohesion across subjects. 

Nevertheless, the students generally enjoyed being in the same room for the month, with teachers moving to them, and I learnt a lot along the way for sure. I like the possibly of another integrated unit next term, look forward to seeing how we manage this one!