Children in most de ve lopin g co untrie s including Ethiopia are victims of exploitivernand abusive forms of child labor. Most children engage d in child labor in Ethiopia workrnin the inform al sec tors. Children in vo lvement in labor activities nega ti vely affec ts theirrnsch oo l enrollment and performance. It leads their lea rnin g and holi stic development to bernat ri sk, as a resu lt they are in nee d of special educational provi sion ; ho wever, little isrnknown so far concerning the educational situations of these children in mo st primaryrnschools of Ethiopia, hence, the major intent of thi s study was to investigate th e classroomrnlearning behaviors of children engaged in child labor and the nature of clas sroomrninstructional practices wi th particular refe rence to it s potential to enhance their learningrnbased on the Theory of Mediated Learning Ex perience(MLE) .The stud y employedrnqualitati ve case study d es ign, four children engage d in child labor and th e ir homeroomrnteac he rs we re purpo sely se lected us in g critical case samp lin g methods. Data was gat heredrnusing systematic observation of the instructional practices, se mi- st ructured in te rvie w andrndocument analysis. The data were analyze d and interpreted using case-by-case and crosscasernanalysis strategie s. The findin gs revealed that children engaged in child laborrncommonly exhibited learning behaviors such as: inattentiveness, sleepine ss , tiredne ss ,rnlack of motivation to learn, feeling of incompetence and inferi ority, lack of time to stud yrnand do assignments which would be related both to the work load and unre s ponsivernin structional practice s. As a re sult, though they fulfilled th e minimal pass marks, theirrnacademic competence was reported as belo w average. Moreover, the instructionalrnpractice s were fo und to be inadequate and in effec ti ve in promoting better learning ofrnchildren engaged in child labor; the y employed varieties of active teaching methods butrnthe actual implementation was limited in it s potential to enhance shld ent s activerninvol ve ment, they dominantly focu sed on promoting the students ' abilities to recall facts.rnCommonly, applause, modeling of hi gh achievers and verbal reinforcement were used tornreinforce students' succ essful completion of tasks but provi si on of feedback for studentsrnattempt and indi vidual pro gress were le ss . Based on the major findin gs conclusions arerndrawn and implic ations in other similar conditions were indicated.