A day in the (integrated) life
With the end of the school year approaching, we often have some flexibility in our schedule that allows us to revisit material from earlier in the year, as well as take some risks with new content of choice. With about a month remaining, my co-teacher and I have been wrapping up loose ends in our curriculum and tying them back together in ways that ideally keep our students as engaged as they were in September.
With the Sunday blues looming yesterday, I decided to take some creative privilege to see how far I could integrate our study topic, birds, into our primary content areas for the day. We typically work to align content areas as best as we can to facilitate this type of integration. Nonfiction reading units are scheduled alongside nonfiction writing. We read texts about our topic during writing workshop and our chapter book read alouds tend to focus on our study topic as well. But, it’s rare that we have an entire day that can focus exclusively on a topic like birds while still engaging with the learning goals that had already been planned. Challenge accepted.
Context: Our class is currently studying birds. This topic encourages us to learn more about some of the sustainability standards for our grade, particularly what the natural landscape in NYC was like before it became an urban community. Looking ahead long-term, this sets students up to be able to envision the lives of the Lenape who thrived here 500+ years ago before becoming colonized.
Arrival and Morning Meeting: We started our day with a question of the day reflecting on our field visit from last week. We asked students to use a word to describe Forest Park, the location we visited to learn more about the natural forests in the region. During arrival, we typically listen to the sounds of birds (thanks, Spotify). We moved into our morning meeting. I prepared our students for the day, letting them know that much of our work would focus either on our trip from the previous week (to a natural forest in Queens) or on our upcoming trip (to a preserved shoreline). During morning meeting, I previewed a new book that we’d received in the mail that details the history of natural New York.
Math: Our math objective for the day focused on graphing. We reviewed the concept of graphing and collecting and organizing data. Students then watched a slideshow of photographs and videos from our trip the previous week. Their goal was to tally how many times certain objects and people appeared in the photo. Then, they created bar graphs to represent their data. While graphing, we discussed what we saw in the photos. We referred to terms from our trip such as “old growth” and remembered the landscape that we explored.
Reading: Our field trip this week will take us to a preserved shoreline in Queens. We’ll be exploring Fort Tilden, a former military fort that operated from around 1917-1974. Our objective for this lesson was note taking while reading (and watching) nonfiction content. Students were given new “birding notebooks” to take notes while reading along articles about Fort Tilden. While reading, we learned about two important birds that frequent the area, hawks and piping plovers. Piping plovers, we learned are endangered and fly from the south to lay their eggs in the sand at Fort Tilden. Under the guise of learning about birds, students analyzed photos of the natural shoreline and compared it to our photos of the forest. The trees are shorter, the ground is covered in sand, the sky is easier to see. We practiced taking notes in short, concise phrases. We reviewed what we’d learned about the fort at the birds at the shoreline in preparation for our writing lesson later that day.
Writing: Our writing block followed the students’ music class. We are currently in a poetry unit. During their time out of our space, I was able to prepare materials for an art based poetry lesson that, again, focused on our study of birds. After modeling and explaining our assignment, students were prompted to choose a topic that they would like to write a poem about. They chose between Fort Tilden and the piping plover, the endangered bird species that we had learned about during reading class. Students chose a photograph of choice, chose a color for their art piece and wrote a poem that included at least 4 facts about their topic. They were encouraged to design their poem as they’d like, and share their poem with their table mates.
Word Study: This was expectedly the most difficult part of the day to integrate our bird study. Considering some of the glued sounds and skills we’d been practicing, I dictated sentences to students surrounding the content we’d learned in the morning. Names of birds and locations were given to students and they were then asked to encode sentences such as, “The wild gull sat on the bench post.” “The piping plover sang a long song to the class.” “Fort Tilden had a lot of tanks” and more. It was an attempt at least. 🙂
Integrated Study: After lunch we typically have a period of the day dedicated to our bird study, during which we learn about our main topic (birds) and all of its related content. Students were given 15 minutes to browse a new collection of texts on Epic all focused on shorelines and beaches. Once called to the rug, we began by reviewing posters we’d created about the forest we visited. We talked about the trees, the ground, the animals and the birds. I then moved to our poster for the shoreline, mostly empty since we’ve just begun studying it. I pointed to the piping plover, the bird we’d learned about during reading. I began describing another bird, one also commonly seen at the shoreline that we could expect to encounter this week. We proceeded to learn about this bird, the gull. Students heard a read aloud about the gull and entered the bird into our birding books. After this activity ended, students were encouraged to return to read on Epic where they could finish the collection of texts on the shoreline.
It was a long and successful day in our classroom. The end of the year is a time of community, a time of reflection, review and research. We were excited today to be able to reflect on our time together last week, as well as look forward to another shared experience on upcoming. Although most days aren’t as entirely integrated as today, it felt good to challenge myself as a teacher to take our study topic and sprinkle it throughout our day into reading, writing, math and word study.