Active Learning

 Welcome back!

Hi there! I hope you are having a great week. This week in third grade my students are learning about fairy tales. This unit has been fun and engaging for my kiddos. Tomorrow, they get to create a fractured fairy tale of The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf! I am excited to read their creative stories and see which literary elements they change up! I will share the title of my favorite next week... stay tuned!

What is Active Learning

The topic I will be discussing this week is active learning and what it looks like in the classroom. Active learning is a broad term and has many different methods that can promote a deeper understanding of content. Overall active learning is a method used in classrooms to engage students by using discussions, problem-solving skills, case studies, role play, and other strategies. This website shares other strategies to use for active learning. I also watched a great YouTube video that explains the difference between active and passive learning. There are many benefits to using active learning in classrooms. According to the University of Minnesota's website, "The benefits to using such activities are many, including improved critical thinking skills, increased retention and transfer of new information, increased motivation, improved interpersonal skills, and decreased course failure." Click here for more information from a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Active Learning with Student Feedback

I read some scenarios of using student feedback as active learning in one of Nicole Zumpano's blog posts. This blog shares how a fifth grade teacher, Ms. Foreman, plans an engaging book review project for her students. I remember growing up in elementary school and giving boring book reports to my class. They were very simple, monotoned, and not engaging whatsoever! This project-based book review allows students to engage with many different resources. The students had different tasks to achieve and used technology to make their reports creative and appealing to their peers. They made audio-recordings, picture collages, and gave feedback. All of these strategies used various websites for students to learn and grow as they worked on their own. At the end of this post, there was a short presentation that shared how to give feedback and how to sort it accordingly. There were also example given so the students could practice sorting the comments into three categories. Below I have embedded a Padlet to share more ideas on this blog post. Check it out!

Photo Creds: Author

Active Learning in my Classroom

As a third grade teacher, I am always prepping and planning different ways for my students to understand content in a way that is engaging and relates to them. As mentioned above, we are currently in our fairy tale unit and my students are reading, listening, and sharing different fairy tale novels. They are completing various graphic organizers to understand all the literary elements in a fairy tale. This week it is their turn to create a fractured fairy tale and share with their classmates. This allows not only the teacher (me) to give feedback, but also feedback from their peers. They can share ideas and elaborate off of each other. My students will be using Flip.com to record their fairy tale and each student will post on a three students video positive feedback. Another active learning method I am looking forward to this fall is a hands-on activity for students to learn multiplication arrays. Multiplication is a new concept for many third graders and their first time being introduced. At the beginning of this unit, I have my students create arrays by using candy corn. This hands-on learning allows my students to understand multiplication in a visual new way and many times will help them see how multiplication is also known as repeated addition. We use technology as well during this activity because I choose a student to demonstrate their array on the board by dragging the digital candy corn. This allows students to reflect if they agree or disagree with the array. Students can check their own work with their peer. This is more engaging than me just simply revealing the array for students to check at their desks. 

Happy first day of Fall and see you in next weeks blog!