Help Your Elementary Student Become an Active Learner

November 10, 2023 byKristina Cappetta

4 min to read

Help Your Elementary Student Become an Active Learner

As a Learning Coach, you want your elementary school student to be as successful as possible, which means encouraging them to be active learners. If you’re new to the online learning community, you need to be aware of common active learning strategies for elementary students to help you achieve this goal.

Since we are committed to helping Learning Coaches foster elementary school engagement, we have some tips for how to help your student become an active learner as well as some active learning activities for elementary students to point you in the right direction.

What Makes an Active Learner?

An active learner is a student who learns by thinking about concepts and asking questions when things don’t make sense. Even children at the elementary school level can become active learners by utilizing age-appropriate techniques.

How to Help Your Student Become an Active Learner

There are several ways Learning Coaches can support elementary school engagement and help their students become more active learners.

Encourage Self-Monitoring

As a Learning Coach, you can encourage your student to stop and think about lessons as they’re reading them. Some students benefit from reflecting in their reading after each page, while others excel after each paragraph. Your student’s grade level will determine how you approach this.

Ask Questions

One way to help your child become a more active learner is to encourage them to ask questions, especially when learning new concepts. They should ask about what they’ve read and be able to answer questions like who, what, where, when, etc.

When it comes to math lessons, they can compare their answer to the correct answer. If it’s wrong, prompt them to ask questions as to why they think it’s wrong and encourage them to try again to find the right answer by talking through their method aloud.

Use Available Resources

Learning Coaches often have many available resources provided by their student’s teachers or found online that are meant to help encourage active learning. There are many worksheets, section review questions, and concept maps that your student can use to check if they understand the topics they are learning. When it comes to elementary engagement, look for lesson guides that can help you support their learning as you encourage your student to think deeply about lesson concepts.

Encourage Your Student to Ask Their Teacher for Clarification

Your student can become an active learner by asking questions when something is not clear. This may require them to reread the lesson or repeat parts to grasp the new concept taught. You can also ask them open-ended questions that will encourage them to think through a specific problem. When you’ve done all this, and the ideas are still not clear, encourage them to talk to the teacher who may have other tools to further explain the lesson.

A child uses a tablet to do active learning activities for elementary school students.

Active Learning Strategies for Elementary Students

There are many different active learning strategies for elementary students and active learning activities for elementary students that you can introduce. Consider these ideas:

Roleplaying

This activity allows students to act out historical events or pretend to be famous historical people. For younger students, they can also pretend to be characters they read about in books. This is an excellent way to bring lessons to life and have your student take a hands-on approach to their learning.

Think-Pair-Share

This method to foster elementary student engagement encourages students to work with others to solve problems and answer questions. They can think independently, share ideas, and then discuss lessons with a partner. Depending on your learning situation, as your student’s Learning Coach, you can be thei partner.

Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning allows students to take a hands-on approach to their learning. Instead of just listening and absorbing information, they are taking learning by doing. For a certain time, they work to inspect a complex problem or question.

They can take what they’ve learned in a science lesson and use it to find ways to help the environment. Students can learn more about the immigration process by knowing where their ancestors came from. They can also learn about diverse cultures by taking what they’ve learned about holidays and creating their own. These types of projects encourage students to use ideas they’ve learned and expand on them in different ways.

Craft Activities

Craft activities are another way to encourage active learning. These types of activities are not only hands-on but also can help children develop fine motor skills. They can also learn about colors, shapes, and other fundamentals by simply doing a craft. Plus, these activities are lots of fun!

When it comes to student engagement strategies for young children, encouraging them to ask questions, be aware, and know when they need help, can all help them become successful active learners. As their Learning Coach, you can also introduce fun activities to get them more interested in what they’re learning and take a hands-on approach.