Quick Update: Colonial Integration
I wanted to share a brief update on the growth of our integrated unit. Currently, we have students forming colonies in Social Studies; they must choose their type of colony, raise money, create a compact or agreement, travel to the new world, journal about their experiences, solve problems encountered along the way and upon arrival, and then discuss their successes or failures as a colony. In English, students are reading a class novel; using subtext to enrich the book with webpage links, images, discussions, and quizzes; taking in-class reading assessments structured similarly to common standardized tests; and discussing Puritan life in depth. They will soon be making horn-books, writing letters home, and engaging in a "witch trial" in which they will be defending or prosecuting members of their Social Studies' colonies utilizing persuasive writing and oral debate. In Science, students will be researching colonial plant dyes and then creating them to dye fabric to form their pieces of a hand-sewn tapestry that will be a combination of all the student-colonies. In Music class, students will be writing and playing colonial style music while using sewing techniques to create period clothing. In P.E. they will start playing typical period games such as Rounders or Blind Man's Bluff. In Math, students are calculating the percentages of lost food in a storm, calculating the area of their colonial land, etc. We are beginning the early stages of planning a Colonial Day that will be a capstone experience during which students will wear their clothing and articles, sing their music, bring in typical colonial food for lunch, experience the harsh reality of plowing fields and clearing trees, and play period games- it will be a sort of "colonial year in survey" in which students will begin with clearing land and end in a celebratory thanksgiving event.
We are working hard at continuing to enrich the unit while ensuring that students have plenty of practice at the essentials each class is designed to instruct. Reading comprehension, expository writing, presentation skills, strategic/critical thinking, problem solving, arithmetic, scientific method, gross motor skills, and musical theory are still being stressed, but they are linked within a single experience. The amount of growth this unit has achieved over the last three years is astonishing. I know that it will only continue to become a richer and more fluid experience for the students.
