Learning Together: How Cross-Age Learning Benefits Students in Lower Elementary

You walk into a Lower Elementary classroom at The Laurel School. Instantly you think something is a little bit different from your memory of school. Kindergartners sit next to second graders. One seven-year-old patiently helps a five-year-old sound out a word. Another six-year-old sits with his mouth dropped open watching an older classmate show them how to “carry” a number in addition.

This isn’t role-reversal. It isn’t students teaching without teachers guiding them. It’s cross-age learning. And it’s one of the many reasons why we love teaching at The Laurel School.

What is cross-age learning?

Put simply, cross-age learning is when multiple ages of children learn together in the same classroom. It’s not a workaround. It’s not a compromise. Educators at The Laurel School have chosen to use mixed-age groupings because we believe they are beneficial for students.

The Laurel School’s Lower Elementary classroom includes students in Kindergarten through Grade 2. That three-year age span isn’t a happy accident. It’s by design.

Benefits of Cross-Age Learning

Students who are Older Become Better Learners

There’s an old saying that reminds us that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. It turns out scientists agree. When kids teach concepts to their little buddies, they learn it better themselves. How? When we teach, we have to think about how to organize our thoughts. How to explain it using words someone else can understand. Even the act of teaching requires us to fill in any gaps in our own knowledge.

At The Laurel School, older students become informal mentors without being asked. It just happens naturally when you create a community where little kids and big kids share the same space. That sense of ownership over their learning empowers students and leads to confidence, strong communication skills, and true academic mastery.

Students who are Younger are Inspired to Stretch

Put a younger child in a room with older kids and watch what happens. Older students aren’t the only ones learning important skills. Younger children absorb so much from their older classmates.

Think about a kindergartner watching a second grade student read aloud from a chapter book. Does the littlest learner think, “I could never do that”? Of course not. They think about how and when they can do it too. It’s the closest thing to teleportation we have in education.

Younger students also look up to older students as role models. They benefit from learning from peers who show patience and remember what it was like to learn something for the first time.

Better Role Models Than You and Me

The reality of most classrooms is that children spend all day, every day with other kids who are almost exactly the same age. There are some benefits to that. But did you know that isn’t how the real world works? Outside of school, family is multigenerational. Neighborhoods are multigenerational. The workplace is definitely multigenerational.

By giving students early experiences learning in and navigating relationships with older and younger kids, we are teaching empathy. We are teaching patience. We are helping them build social skills that will last a lifetime.

Why The Laurel School Does Cross-Age Learning

We could list benefits all day long. But at The Laurel School, we don’t group kids together because it’s fun or novel. We group them together because we believe the community itself becomes the curriculum.

Watching a second grader help a kindergartner button their coat? Both kids are learning. When they sit next to each other at morning meeting and talk about what they noticed on the walk to school? You bet they are learning.

Cross-age learning teaches children about learning in community. In relationship with one another. It’s not a new idea. In fact, it’s going back to something that’s always been true about how children learn best.

Let’s learn together.