Innovated Curricular Design and Implementation About “Protecting Myself and The Environment” in Integrative Activities for 5th Graders - Water Resources

[[abstract]]The goal of this research was to discuss the influences on the 5th graders within the domains of affection and creativity. An innovated curriculum about two sides of the water incorporated the environmental issue of water resources into the integrative activities. The subjects were 34 fifth graders including 17 boys and 17 girls in Tong De Elementary School in Taoyuan County. An action research and a qualitative research were done in the study. The researcher collected related data from document analysis, students’ work, classroom observation and interviews in class and did the analysis, description and interpretation. “ The Attitude to Water Resources Scale”, “The Creativity Aptitude Scale”, and “The Curriculum Satisfaction Scale” are applied for quantitative assessments after class. All the data were processed in one way ANCOVA. The findings were listed as follows: 1.The disadvantage of textbooks were found by researcher. After checking the current ○○ Edition textbooks of the Integrated Activities, the researcher found that the textbooks were lack of the fourth theme, distributive curricular arrangement, public issues and innovation strategies in the books, so the researcher designed this innovated curriculum. 2.The curriculum, Two Sides of The Water, is an innovation. The feature of this innovated curriculum was to focus on the affective domain. The spirit of Integrated Activities Curriculum-- experience, reflection and implementation, was incorporated into the activities. The experience of life, the cognition learning, media reading, analysis of learning discrimination and progressing creativity design were included in the content of the curriculum. Students understood more about protecting water resources, so they changed their attitudes and went to save water. 3.The learning efficiencies of the innovation curriculum-- Two Sides Of The Water, are listed as below: (1)Analysis of learning efficiency: After teaching experiment, there was significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in “The attitude to water resources Scale.” It meant that the implementation of the innovated curriculum was meaningful to elementary school students. (2)The performance of students’ creativity: After learning, students significantly turned to be more curios and creative according to the statistics on “The Creativity Aptitude Scale” . (3)Satisfaction of the curriculum: The average scores in the sections of curriculum planning, activity designing, assessment methods as well as interactions between the teacher/students and among students were all above 4.16, which meant the innovated curriculum was positive to students’ leaning. 4.Reflection and growth of the researcher: Through the curriculum plans enabled students to enjoy learning, students have better ability to solve problems in the real world. The innovated curriculum about water resources is quite different from the traditional one because the affective domain is the core center of the curriculum. According to the above findings, it is suggested that more innovated curricula on environmental protection can be developed in the future, so that the students can be influenced and change their attitudes and behaviors .