Mini-Lesson

This is the mini-lesson that I would have liked to have been able to teach.

However, the team of teachers I am working with does not have any team planning and when I asked about getting together to form an interdisciplinary unit, they said that they did not do them. I made up a unit that I would have liked to have used and have pulled this mini-lesson from that unit. The main theme for the unit is Mexico and the unit itself shows how areas dealing with Mexico can be connected between the various disciplines.

This lesson is included in the interdisciplinary unit and involves planning a trip to Mexico. The students perform all tasks involving traveling to Mexico ranging from deciding how much the trip will cost them to packing their luggage to visiting the different climate areas of Mexico. This is a collaborative assignment in which the class members either are all working together or working together in small groups. This lesson covers the disciplines of Social Studies, Language Arts, Math, and Science. The students are required to use higher level thinking skills throughout most of the lesson and will have to use sources other than their textbooks in order to find all the information they will need.

The main assessment for evaluating student understanding of this mini-lesson is that they will write a letter home to mom and dad describing their trip. They will be given a rubric showing what must be contained in the letter such as the weather, the scenery, the food, the music, and so on. Another assessment that will be used is that the students will put on small plays depicting their visit to Mexico from beginning to finish. The students will include aspects of the trip such as the flight over and their interaction with the people living in Mexico. The students will also have to depict in their plays the culture of the Mexican society.

I may not have been able to do this mini-lesson during my lab experience but I sincerely hope to one day in either another classroom or in my own in the future. I feel this lesson would be very beneficial to the students and would give them a better understanding of how close the "different" discipline areas are connected. We, as future teachers, must constantly strive to show the students these connections in an attempt to gain greater internalization of the material. Unless we make it meaningful to the students, they are not likely to retain what we have spent such a great deal of time planning. Teachers need to realize this and understand that interdisciplinary teaching does not mean that their particular subject will be lost in the middle somewhere!!!