There are 6 key elements to an integrated curriculum:
1. Your curriculum must be aligned to both state and national standards. This makes it so that everything has a purpose while you are teaching it. You must make sure that the curriculum overlaps in the subject areas that you are integrating.
2. You must have a focus for your curriculum and you must determine what topics or areas of study will be included in your instruction. By doing this, you are allowing for blended content among differing areas of study and making your units revolve around a common theme.
3. You must know that basic reading and math skills are linked with social studies and science. It is not very hard to see that basic reading is needed among all subject areas. However, students must also be able to pull basic reading skills such as recognizing cause and effect, analyzing documents, and sequencing events or ideas in other disciplines too.
For example, in order to fully understand the Constitution of the United States of America, a student must be able to do a variety of things such as read and analyze the constitutional amendments, recognize the cause and effect relationship between the events of the time and the inclusions of different amendments, as well as be able to sequence events such as the creation of the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence.
4. You must make planning a team effort when attempting to implement an integrated curriculum. This is done in all grade levels, and by doing this teachers are sharing ideas revolving around different themes. If your school has a different teacher for each subject, those teachers can get together and share ideas from their disciplines in order to help other teachers create ways to integrate the content in their own classrooms.
5. You must include both informal and formal assessments throughout your unit. This can include a variety of different means of assessment from simple teacher observation to things such as daily quizzes, homework, worksheets, unit testing, as well as standardized teaching such as end-of-grade (EOG) and end-of-course (EOC) testing.
6. You must differentiate instruction for your students within the unit. You can use a variety of strategies such as flexible grouping, tiered assignments, assignment contracts, or even independent study to get this done.
For example, if you use assignment contracts, you can create contracts in which students must complete one assignment from each level of Bloom's taxonomy that is appropriate to their current level and/or ability of understanding, which allows you to assess the student while also allowing the student a variety of means to get the assignments done and display their understanding of a topic to cater to the differences in how students learn and understand content.