Why Teachers Should Incorporate Cross-Curricular Activities

Provide Relevance

Isolating the subjects is practical for a school schedule, but showing students how the subjects connect makes the subject matter relevant. The world doesn’t come compartmentalized. Students will not experience life in subject-based time blocks. Cross-curricular teaching takes the subjects out of their cubby holes and connects them to the big picture. It attempts to answer that ever-present question, “Why do I need to know this?” Providing the context of the other subjects will also help students retain and recall the new and unfamiliar information.

Pique Interest

Giving students context to the subject matter within something they may be passionate about shows them how their interests and hobbies connect to learning. The math they perceive as “boring” suddenly becomes exciting when connected to interests such as cars, recipes, finance, or art. You can show them how they can do what they love with the knowledge they are gaining.

Encourage Critical Thinking

Develop critical-thinking skills by allowing students to figure out on their own what knowledge they will need to apply to cross-curricular projects. Assign a project such as preparing a cultural dish and sharing the history of that dish, which requires knowledge of mathematical measurements to complete the recipe, history of the origins, writing, and possibly computer science (when presenting with either a report or slide presentation). Given the topic of race, students can draw from multiple areas of research: genetics to show that there are no racial categorizations, history to document the evil committed because of prejudice, statistics that record pro- and anti-slavery opinions during the Civil War, literature like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that speaks against prejudice toward people with different skin tones, and the biblical explanation and foundation for the origin and value of the one human race.

Examples

There are many ways to incorporate cross-curricular activities. Collaborate with the teachers of the other subjects. Find out what they are teaching and find ways to reference and incorporate those principles, concepts, and topics. An example for the younger grades is choosing a “letter of the week,” and showing how that letter shows up in different subjects (e.g., the letter “s” is at the beginning of the words space, subtraction, Solomon, and sentence). For older students, show on a timeline where history and the eras of literature, art, and technology coincide. Create themed micro-units. For example, you could create a unit on farming and teach the science of agriculture, the history of the American Western Expansion, land and crop measurements, and literature such as The Grapes of Wrath or Little House on the Prairie.

The “Cross” Connection

The most important cross-curricular connection to emphasize is that God’s Word provides the foundation for all subjects. God is the Author of life. He ordered the laws of the universe that the disciplines of math and science rely on. He is the Master Artist and Author of words—the Creator who spoke the world into existence and divided the human race by language groups at Babel. He knows the beginning and end of history and is sovereign over all of it.

If you have the freedom to do so, teach students how the foundation for all subjects is God’s Word. You can put the biblical accounts on the historical timeline so students can see that the history in the Bible is not fantasy. Explain the account of Babel so students have a foundation for understanding why we have different languages. Teach students that science and math have order because God ordered the universe with reliable laws.

Isolating the subjects is not unlike humanism, which studies the creation without acknowledging a Creator and denies the spiritual by solely focusing on the physical. Humanism divorces the subjects from God, removing him from origins and denying him in design. If students can see where math, science, language, and history come from, it can save them from drowning in confusion and show them how all knowledge intersects in one arrow pointing to the Creator.