Interdisciplinary Unit

Our school is working on a building-wide project.  The teachers were told to pair up and create an interdisciplinary unit.  Since this is a new endeavor, the parameters are pretty loose.  We have to complete the unit sometime within the first two weeks of February and we have to incorporate another content area.  Our theme is "Around the World". 

I have such a hard time coming up with ideas for things like this.  I tend to be a very linear thinker when it comes to incorporating other disciplines into my lessons, even though I was taught to do it frequently in my undergrad.  So when I came up with an idea that not only made sense, but also worked with my current unit, I was ecstatic.  We are currently in our Polygon unit, which focuses on parallelograms.  Our next unit is Similarity.  When thinking about things from around the world that are parallelogram in shape, I thought of flags, which connect to Global History - the social studies course our 9th and 10th are currently enrolled in.  I also thought that in analyzing how the shape influences the design of the flag, students could recreate the flag to scale.

The 10th grade Global History teacher assigned students a country and had them research what the country was doing in World War I, their current unit of study, and what the flag means.  I'm having students study the properties of the shape of the flag (they're all rectangles), printing out a small picture of the flag, and having students scale the flag up to a full sheet of paper, with respect to the proper proportions.

I anticipate my next post to be about the results of the project.