Planning for integrated learning

Purpose

Integrated learning takes place in conjunction with dedicated studies where specific skills and techniques are taught explicitly. Some of the benefits of integration are that it:

  • allows students to use their existing skills, knowledge, interests and experience.
  • provides varied contexts for the demonstration of student competence.
  • encourages students to make connections between school learning and life-learning.
  • offers a range of processes through which to explore the content and to express understanding.
  • makes the curriculum more manageable for teachers, enabling students to achieve a number of outcomes from one starting point.
  • has explicit teaching intentions, and therefore specific, describable, assessable outcomes.

Integrating curriculum has the potential to improve student learning across the KLAs and to help students see purpose in their learning.

Teaching points

In this example of an integrated unit, ‘More than bread and water', the ideas and issues came first – the means of exploring those issues, and linking them with the KLAs, followed.

‘More than bread and water’
Ideas / issues: What do humans need to survive?
Host area: Science & Technology – life and living outcomes
Texts: Let the celebrations begin. Margaret Wild and Julie Vivas, Omnibus, 1989. Rose meets Mr Wintergarden. Bob Graham, Penguin Books, 1992.
New ideas: ‘after physical survival, humans need love, acceptance, community …’
Other KLAs: English (Reading and Viewing); Health (Human development / Human relations); SOSE/HSIE (Culture – membership of families and groups) 

  1. Students investigate the needs of living things.
  2. Class discusses, ‘What else do humans need apart from food and shelter?’
  3. Class collects stories eg The Selfish Giant. Discuss the nature of parables and fables. Link stories to needs identified above.
  4. Students compare the construction and form of texts.
  5. Students create their own stories in which people learn to share and enjoy having friends.

More information

PEN 119: Connor, J. Links with literary texts. e:lit - the Primary English Teaching Association, Newtown