Active Learning
Jean Piaget, the father of all educational research, teaches us that children of all ages need to move, explore, discover, touch, taste, see, smell, hear, think, talk, observe, use their intuition and try new things. In other words, children need to "do" something in order to learn it. This seems fairly obvious. If you show a child a picture of a tower and explain the word "balance" to him, he will not learn anything. He has to build a tower himself in order to get it. Teachers call this 'hands-on' or 'active' learning.
At Eagle Creek, we believe in active learning at all age levels. Here are some examples:
- Compose a song on the synthesizer
- Practice place value with base ten rods
- Soak human teeth in water, Sprite and Coke and record the results
- Videotape, narrate and edit a tour of the school, then send it to a new student coming from overseas
- Poll students on their vote for the U.S. president and create bar graphs showing how the different demographics responded
- Lay out the tracks and build the village by hand for a G-scale train set
- Connect a lemon and a potato with two dissimilar wires and watch the light bulb turn on
- Be a famous person for the School Wax Museum, acting and talking in character, but only when somebody turns you on
- Write and perform a skit, such as The Three Little Pigs, in Spanish
- Prepare and stage a debate on charging a 10 cent deposit for plastic water bottles
- Cover the gym floor with 100,000 paperclips, just to see how much that is
"The teachers assess and address each student’s learning style and provide plenty of ‘hands on’ learning." Mrs. Gawronski
