What is hands on learning? 

Miriam (2021) states that hands-on (kinesthetic) learning is where a student participates or carries out physical activities relating to subject material rather than listening to a lecture. When I think about hands-on, I think of a teacher being the facilitator for the students' learning instead of the lecturer. Being the facilitator allows the teacher to be able to walk around and make observations assessing students verbally. As the facilitator, you can use open-ended questions to provide better understanding and expand on a students' thought. 

When it comes to first grade, we tend to get away from hands-on. I feel like Pre-k and Kindergarten have more use of this and their students benefit from it. However, in first we expect them to come to us knowing everything fine motor and sensory but sometimes we still need to give them hands-on for your diverse learners. Some of the benefits in hands-on for students are student engagement, better retention of material, helps with problem solving skills, life skills, and allows for students to practice applying learning skills. 

While doing these course for American College of Education, I was able to gain knowledge of different sources to help out my first grade diverse learners. Check out some of the sources below! 

EXAMPLES:

READING

Students have letter tiles in first grade. This helps students to spell the sounds they our sounding out and blending the words. They can also use these to spell the word and change the beginning, middle or ending sounds of the words they are creating. 

MATH

In first grade, students use lots of different manipulatives to help them add or subtract problems. On this picture, we can see the students are using Unifix cubes to help problem solve the addition problem giving to them on the card. Some other materials we use in first grade to help with hands-on are: counters, dice, dominoes, pattern blocks, etc.