Engaged Learning in the Classroom

    The teachers that I did my service learning hours with engaged the students in a variety of ways. One example is when the fourth graders were learning about rocks. Instead of just showing them rocks, the teacher gave each of them a box and characteristics about a certain rock. Then the students would try to guess which one it was. After this she would go more into detail about the rocks and the students would record the notes in their journals. Another way I have seen engaged learning is through reading groups. Instead of the child reading the book on their own, they are assigned to a group and they read and answer questions about the book together. This makes the work seem more fun, since they get to work with some of their friends. The last way I have seen engaged learning was in a Kindergarten classroom. The teacher had games that went along with the math assignment. For example, during Valentine's Day week, she had candy hearts that they had to count and make a graph of how many there were. Also, they had to roll two dice and add them up, then color in that number on their paper. By incorporating games the children don't see it as another daunting subject in school.

     One thing that I witnessed in a classroom that wasn't as engaging was the math lesson. Even though the teacher was helping and doing the work with them, it was still just work out of a book. I think it would have been more engaging had they had a real life example or even something in the classroom that they could work with to solve the problem. Overall the classrooms I was in had very engaging activities and I was able to learn a lot from them.

Engaged Learning can help the children see things in new ways!