Collaboration- It's a winner!

The great thing about planning as a team is all the wonderful ideas everyone else comes up with. This term we have been trying to link all our subjects together more rather than just stand alone lessons.

Our Topic this term has been ‘Change’ and we decided to look at it from the scientist point of view and investigate solids, liquid, and gases. The idea was that we wanted to do some hands on experiments that even the students could do at home with their parents.

As I have been somewhat unhappy about how we have been planning and integrating our learning I decide to try a more ‘cross curriculum’ approach to these lessons.

We had just finished two weeks on ANZAC where we based our reading and art work on this and we had thoroughly enjoyed it. So we decided why not continue.

The hardest part about doing this is all the ideas everyone has and narrowing it down to what is best for the students. Planning together is great but there has to be an understanding that your ideas may not be used. I think this can be a hard one for teachers to grasp and understand as obviously we all have great ideas!

The next challenge was to try and link it to writing!

This is where one of my colleagues came in with the book ‘The Oobleck’ by Dr Seuss. This is a book I had never heard about and when I Goggled it I realised that making Oobleck was a thing. Straight away I was hooked!

Collaboration works as on my own I would have never come up with this idea. To be honest I don’t think any of my ideas would have been this exciting either.

What we managed to do was link our writing, maths and science from just one book. It meant that even though I only have some of my homeroom students for an hour a day when we were talking about Oobleck they knew exactly what I meant.

I have always been a big fan of planning together and trying to link more of our subjects together and so far it has paid off.