My favorite part of puzzles is when I find a piece that fits perfectly into it's place without having to try so many times. That rarely happens for me, so I am super excited when it does. I have this same feeling as a teacher. There are moments when one of my ideas works perfectly with another idea and everything just- works!
When I take a peep at the curriculum that I have to teach my Kindergartners, I always look for ways that I can integrate one content area focus into another. How can I take what we are learning in Science and integrate that into our writing time? How can I take what we are focusing on in Literacy and integrate it into our Math time? I truly believe that the more I can integrate contents within contents, the more natural and purposeful my students' learning can be in the classroom.
I introduced our topic of stories by asking our essential question: Why do people tell stories? As you can see in the image above, I had a few different answers. In order to expand their thinking of stories just a bit, I asked them about where stories can be found. To support our discussion, we listened to Dan Yaccarino read his book I Am A Story on YouTube. This gave my students a more visual look at what a story is and how stories have come about. After our discussion, we left the topic alone and moved on with our day.
I saw an opportunity to "kill two birds with one stone today during our social/emotional lesson
today. I took our focus of why people tell stories from Literacy and brought it into our Second Step lesson about how feelings feel in our bodies. Since I know the end goal for my students in both content areas, I knew that my two ideas would fit perfectly together.
I looked at the social/emotion lesson the day before and knew that our focus was going to be on worrying and my students can recognize when they are worried. I also knew that I had the book Ruby Finds A Worry by Tom Percival in my classroom. Although we've read Ruby Finds A Worry before, this time we would be looking at with a new lens. The first time we read it, we were preparing to attend school in person after learning virtually, so there were a lot of worries from both my students and myself. This time when we read it, we were reading it as readers who are discovering the purpose of telling stories AND we were reading it as Kindergartners who are exploring their social and emotional development.
I introduced our Second Step lesson and told them that we would be learning about how our feelings feel in our bodies and that we would focus on the feeling of worry. I then went on to read and we did what we normally do during read aloud; discuss, question, connect and notice. We then went back to our lesson and discussed what was going on with Samarah, our focus in the lesson. We had to find out how she was feeling based on how her body was feeling when she found out her Grandpa was sick. We took note of what parts of our body holds our worry and discussed how to help Samarah.
I then referenced the book we just read and asked them why the author/illustrator, Tom Percival wrote Ruby Finds A Worry. In the poster below, you can see the 3 responses that I received. Yesterday, they told me that people tell stories to tell other people or they
have experienced something, so it's only right that those would be their responses. I took it step further and brought our "friend" Samarah back in the mix and posed this question: "What would Samarah find out if she read Ruby Finds A Worry?" The writing in the black box, on the poster on the right, shows the exact response I received from one of my students. She'd learn how to deal with her worry, as my students and I have learned.
Today, my students discovered one answer to our essential question; people tell stories to inform. Isn't that beautiful? So tomorrow, during our Literacy time, I will reference our conversation from today and I will be able to share that conclusion with them. And we will celebrate how as readers, they were able to discover that on their own through reading and helping a "friend" find out how to shrink her worry about her Grandpa. From there, we will go on to write wonderful stories ourselves and share them with one another!
So, I challenge you to find the puzzle pieces within your curriculum. Think about opportunities where you and your students can explore different content areas within other content areas. What content areas, subjects, activities, topics, etc., just fit together? Think about it.
Happy Teaching-
The Queendom Teacher
Comments