Crosscurricular project

 Develop an action plan

NAME: Mar Mañanes Olmo

AGE GROUP/S YOU TEACH:  lower primary

 

1.   Our intention is to show that collaborating between different departments/subjects is possible and also an advantage for our bilingual students.

In our case English, Science and Arts and crafts teachers will work together in a common project to show students what the water cycle is and how it works.

In the action plan of this project, we have initially programmed individual lessons of each subject to give the student a first approach to the issue. As we said, we would like to teach our students about the water cycle.

We will start in the Science class with presentations and videos about our topic: the water cycle process (water different states of matter: liquid, solid and gas water) and its elements (oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, streams and soils; snow, glaciers, ice caps in North and South Poles; clouds, atmosphere). Our students will be introduced to the topic and they are going to get used to the different terms of the lesson vocabulary.

At the same time, in the Arts and Crafts Class, we want them to work with colours and textures (hard, soft, rough, jagged, bumpy, spongy, slimy…). Students will draw, paint and build the elements of the water cycle that they have seen in the Science class.

In the English class, we will work with them the sounds of the words they have learn in the Science class. We want them to learn the vocabulary, but we also want them to pronounce the sounds that compound those words properly.

Finally, we have planned sessions in which teachers of the three subjects involved are present with the students. In these sessions, students will use the works they made in the previous classes to show what they have learnt. With different memory games or games such as enchained words, they will use the vocabulary and practice their pronunciation of these words.

In our opinion, working together with other teachers in an action plan like this enriches our students learning process, making it easier for them to learn the contents in the three subjects involved and for us to asses/evaluate them.

They are working common vocabulary in different subjects, with the same criteria from the teachers, which helps the students to establish learning links that help them to learn and makes their learning deeper.

There is coordination to catch the attention from the students, we want to motivate them; there are no repeated contents that can make some students get bored because they have already seen them in another subject, so they may disconnect from the subject, and we don’t want that to happen.

From my point of view, all bilingual teachers should work coordinated so that students get a better understanding of the contents being taught.

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