Yvonne McBlain from Falkirk Education Service Support and Improvement team gathered some good interdisciplinary learning practice during a validation visit at Head of Muir Primary School on 10th and 11th February 2014.

Alan McNab’s primary 6/7 class were learning about WWII – click here and here to see their fantastic classroom displays. Alan is using the storyline approach – click here to see a family biography and find out whether the pupils decided to evacuate the children in their household. Alan had carefully planned opportunitites for his pupils to develop and apply their literacy skills within this context.  Click to see posters and war leaflets where his pupils develop their note taking, writing and reading comprehension skills. Click here and here  to see how Alan enabled pupils to apply numeracy and technology skills within the WWII context. Alan is very effectively linking small numbers of experiences and outcomes to make learning relevant and coherent for his pupils. He is also making sure that his pupils are aware of which skills are being developed within interdisciplinary learning and showing pupils that these skills can be transferred to many tasks.

Nicola Taylor, primary 3 teacher, took a very creative and responsive approach to planning learning within the Vikings context. She initially used a collection of stimulus objects to encourage pupils to come up with questions about the Vikings (click to view a KWL Viking Shield). She was then able to plan learning intentions, success criteria and learning experiences which would enable pupils to evidence progression in their learning linked to SOC 1-02a & 1-04a, and LIT 1-01a. Click here and here to see some of the tasks she designed to help answer the questions her pupils had. They were particularly interested in what the Vikings ate – click here & here to view specific literacy tasks. Click to see another example of a text created by a pupil which allows the application of literacy skills within the Viking context. As can be seen from the photo below, Nicola and her pupils had turned their classroom entrance into the exterior of a Viking home, and pupils are now A Viking  in their longships (click to view).