Week of July 17th Blog Assignment

A topic that I will commonly be teaching in the future (assuming that I stay in the 5^th grade) will be earth science weather concepts. There are several resources outside of the science content area that can help me teach these concepts to enable students to understand it better.

The first resource that I found is a book of children’s poetry on the topic of earth science. This book is called Earthshake, written by Lisa Westberg Peters. You can look at some of the book at this link: http://browseinside.harpercollinschildrens.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060292652. Not all of the poems in this book talk about weather, but a lot of them do. For example, one poem talks about the wind current patterns on earth. I would use this resource as a supplement to the curriculum after I have taught the basic weather concepts that the poems talk about. I would have students read the poetry about weather, to provide them with another delivery of the information. I would also have students write their own earthshake-inspired science poetry about the topics we are learning about. I could use this book to teach a series of interdisciplinary English-Science lessons.

Another resource I could use is the USA today Weather and Atmospheric science history archive online, at this link: http://www.usatoday.com/weather/whistory.htm. This resource has huge lists of historical weather events. You can use this website to look up the worst Atlantic storms since the 1400’s, all of the recorded US hurricanes since 1900, the history of US floods and droughts, and much more. Since 5^th grade social studies covers American History, I could tie the science curriculum in with US History through this website. Students could find out what the weather was like during major historical events, and speculate on how the weather might have affected those events. Students could also draw weather maps of historical events based on what they learn on this site and what they know about how weather works.

As a multiple subject teacher, I believe that interdisciplinary teaching is incredibly valuable and doable. I think that when the knowledge that students are learning ties in with many different subjects, they are more likely to see the value in it. In addition, when students are being taught content in several subjects and in different ways, every student is more likely to learn and retain the knowledge. Since I will teach my students every subject, I can weave common themes throughout the whole day, and in thematic units. Obviously, there are some subjects that link together better than others, such as science and math, and language arts and history, but it is possible to teach all subjects in a cross-curricular manner. I suppose a challenge of doing this is that it requires teacher to think outside the box of the prescribed curriculum and textbooks they are given. However, I believe that good teachers see this as an exciting and positive challenge, rather than a negative and impossible task.

Commented: Eddie Izumizaki
Read: Ashley Dever and Betsy Varellas