The Impacts of Integrated Teaching in the Elementary Classroom

"The world in which our students live, and the one which they will inherit, is integrated and cross-disciplinary. In schools, we break the world down into fragments, but the preference is to consider phenomena coherently-to identify the pattern and structure with context as a clue." (Jones and Thomas, 2006, p. 64). Due to the current trends of standardized testing, non-testable subjects such as art and social studies have taken a backseat in the elementary classroom. The purpose of this research is to attempt to overcome these pressures through the approach of integrated, or multi-subject, teaching. My research was conducted in two separate classrooms, kindergarten and the fourth grade. Through teaching multiple lessons students were exposed to an integrated approach to learning. These lessons centered on pulling elements of core subjects such as math and language arts into lessons focused on non-testable areas like art and social studies. By doing this I hoped to give merit to these subjects while building connections between the different areas of academia as well as the real world.