Students at my school are fortunate to have liberal access to computers, scanners, and a digital camera, and I encourage my students to use these tools in every way possible. To help make the factual part of my curriculum make more sense to my students, I integrate everything that will naturally fit together. For example, when we study animal behavior and adaptations, students research animals in books and on-line. They take notes on note cards from each source using an outline that I provide for them. Each Roman numeral of the outline becomes a note card.
Students locate their animals' home ranges on maps.
In art, the students do scientific drawing of their animals. While this is going on, we are reading myths and fables in our reading class. After students have read or heard a number of stories from these genre, they write their own myth about the animal on which they did their research. We read the completed compositions in class and select several stories that will be turned into short plays. The music teacher works with the students to compose background music and sound effects for the plays.