Children need an environment conducive to learning, one where active learning is encouraged. the teachers’ biggest role is to make school experiences for young children stimulating and one where they can nurture their love for learning. To begin to make classrooms centres of active learning for childeren, teachers first of all need to understand children as active learners.

Understanding Children as Active Learners
Active learning has been described as the direct and immediate experiencing of objects, people, ideas, and events. It is a necessary condition for cognitive restructuring and hence for development. Put simply, young children learn concepts, form ideas, and create their own symbols or abstractions through self-initiated activity—moving, listening, searching, feeling and manipulating. Such activity, carried on within a social context in which an alert and sensitive teacher is a participant-observer, makes it possible for the child to be involved in intrinsically interesting experiences that may produce contradictory conclusions and a consequent reorganization of the child’s understanding of his/her world. Ideally in active learning classrooms, children are active agents who construct their own knowledge of the world as they transform their ideas and interactions into logical and intuitive sequences of thought and action, work with diverse materials to create personally meaningful experiences and outcomes, and talk about their experiences in their own words.

What Teachers Should Do to Create An Active Learning Setting?

Provide a variety of materials for children to work with:
Teachers can provide a variety of materials to assure that there are plentiful opportunities for children to make choices and manipulate materials—key aspects of the active learning process. Materials may include any familiar or unfamiliar objects of interest to young children, except for things that are clearly dangerous or too difficult for this age group.

The following are some general types of materials that are typically offered to stimulate young children’s active learning:

Practical Everyday Objects Useful To Adults. Children enjoy using the same things that the important people in their lives use—a lunch box like baba’s, earrings like ammi’s and walking stick like dada jan’s.

Natural And Found Materials.Natural materials like shells and pebbles and found materials like cardboard boxes and toilet-paper tubes appeal to children because they can be used in many different ways for many different purposes. And they appeal to teachers because they are easily accessible, plentiful, and often free.

Tools.Tools are important to children for the same reason they are important to adults—they help “get the job done.” Therefore, provide real tools—scissors, hole punches, construction tools like hammers and screwdrivers. (It is important that tools be in good condition and that safety procedures be followed consistently by both children and teachers.)

Messy, Sticky, Gooey, Drippy, Squishy Materials.Touchable materials like sand, water, paint, and plasticine appeal strongly to many children because of the interesting sensory experiences they provide.

Heavy, Large Materials.Children use their whole bodies, exercise their muscles, and gain a sense of their physical capacities when using large wooden blocks, shovels, wheeled toys, and other sturdy, heavy materials.

Easy-to-handle Materials.Materials that fit in their hands—buttons, toy figures, blocks and clothes pins—give children a sense of control because they can use such small objects successfully without adult assistance.

Improvise with materials.Teachers must not restrict themselves based on availability of specific materials to play and teach children. They must demonstrate their creativity and improvise with the use of materials; such as using recycled paper for origami or going out in the play ground and draw sketches on mud with a stick.