Engaged Learning in the classroom

This topic of the students being engaged in learning makes me excited! I was in a classroom with a fourth grade teacher who used this concept all the time. She was a very hands on learning teacher and used the concept of engaged learning constantly. A few examples that I saw in the classroom were as follows. One day the students were learning new vocabulary words and she had them get into groups to look at the word on the card she had given them. She let them discuss what the word meant and how they wanted to act out the word that was coming up in the next unit of reading they were doing. Each group got a turn to act out their word in front of the class as the class guessed what the word was. They had so much fun doing this activity.

Another day that I was in the classroom they were learning about arrays and after she taught the lesson she sat 7 papers around the room so the students could walk around the room to look at the pictures and do the problems around the room instead of sitting at their desks and just working on a worksheet about what they had just learned. She also used base ten blocks when she was teaching them about another section of math and each student had their own set of blocks to work with at their desk.

These students had worksheets, but they were using active and engaged learning most of the day in their classroom. I believe it helped them interact with each other and help them to learn the concepts better than just sitting down and doing worksheets all of the time.