An Interdisciplinary Approach To Science and Nutrition

Have you ever heard of an "interdisciplinary" curriculum?   It's one of the latest catch-phrases in the world of public school education, kind of the latest fad, if you will.   Interdisciplinary instruction simply means to coordinate resources and materials from multiple subject areas to cover a particular topic.  Many of us homeschoolers have been doing this for years, in the form of unit studies.  Even if your main curriculum isn't structured this way, you've probably at some point done a unit study or theme unit, right?

There are entire curriculum aligned on this basis.  Konos comes to mind.  Five in a Row is one I've used personally with my own kids and absolutely LOVED.  I'm sure there are others, but the point is that the concept of interdisciplinary study is hardly anything new.   Marketing teams can put a new spin on it and try to sell it to you, for sure, but the bottom line is that kids learn the subject matter especially well when it is covered in multiple disciplines.   

So instead of a boring math textbook with pages and pages of math problems, a child who also learns how math applies to music will have a greater appreciation of both.  Or more simply, a child who learns about China in a Social Studies book will gain more depth of understanding if the teacher plans a celebration of Chinese New Year too.  Another example of interdisciplinary learning would be a unit study about rivers....the geography of the land, how rivers are created, what creatures live there and their life cycles, the heat energy or chemical contamination of rivers, and all of this interspersed with poetry, art, or works of literature relating to rivers too.  See how it all comes together?  Instead of just learning A, B, and C, teach your kids about A, B, and C and their relation to the rest of the alphabet too!

This is how I approach homeschooling and education.  Nutrition should not be a subject unto its own.  It should be taught as bits and pieces of a much bigger picture.  We can learn about the science of nutrition, and the calculations and math behind it too.  But there are less obvious tie-ins to social studies, history, and many other fields.  Often, the interdisciplinary topics are where the real learning and understanding takes place.

Have your kids learn by doing.  Teach them to garden, and to cook, and to calculate, and to THINK about nutrition, not to regurgitate information. It's about learning about materials, and then DOING something with them!   But shake things up too, and do a little of the unexpected.   Creating and doing helps kids to learn across a wide spectrum of disciplines.