Classroom Activities

READING REMEDIAL AND ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES
By Janelle Martel (2012)
Remedial Activity
A remedial activity is one that is meant to improve a learning skill or rectify a problem area. Remedial instruction involves using individualized teaching of students who are experiencing difficulties in specific subject areas. Remedial instruction might be taught individually or in groups and targets academic weaknesses that may hinder learning. Remedial activities teach basic skills that are the foundation for learning a subject in greater detail, and such skills must be learned before students can develop a detailed understanding of the topic of study.
Teaching remedial reading can be a repetitive process, which can be frustrating for both the student and the teacher. Luckily, there are many resources such as free remedial reading activities out that are both effective and provide variety.
Make sure that children understand that everything in the classroom has a name, and that they understand what these things do. A good activity is to create labels for everything in the classroom. This will help students to associate the written word with an object, and encourage them to vocalize what it is they are wanting. If you avoid referring to things as "this" or "that," then the students will begin to as well. This can lead to different activities for different age groups and reading levels.
Younger students will appreciate the alphabet in their classroom, as it increases familiarity and can also be used as a teaching tool. Capital letters work best, as they are easier for students to recognize. Pictures that students create can also be labeled, or students can work on a scrapbook activity. This can also lead to small field trips where any written words are pointed out. For example, the word stop across a stop sign.
Older students can incorporate this into other activities. For example, in planning to prepare something in the kitchen, students can work to create a grocery list and then read the products to find what they are looking for at the grocery store.

Encourage Daily Reading
It's very important for children to be interested in reading, but this is often difficult when children's reading levels and interest levels differ. A high-low reading list is a very good resource to help find books that students will be interested in. Reading magazines and newspapers are also great as they have many short articles, but make students feel grown-up. Reading aloud is a great thing to do, though students will usually come across words they don't know. A few tips for dealing with this are:
Encourage them to sound the word out completely, rather than guessing after the first letter or syllable.
Have them read the entire sentence with the unknown word omitted. Then ask them what word would fit in the blank.
Once they have figured out the correct word, have them read the entire sentence again so they finish without struggling.
If students have particular trouble with sounding words out and resort to guessing, a good activity is to write a list of nonsense words, and have them sound them out. This teaches students to sound the entire word out, without guessing.
Focus on Comprehension
Comprehension is a major part of reading, and is an important thing to develop in remedial readers. It is usually easier to start with a TV show or sports program before introducing comprehension exercises to short stories. Comprehension should include how to summarize, predict, context and monitor. Summarizing can be done by asking students to retell a story in just a few sentences, predicting can be started by asking the student what they think might happen next. Context is especially useful for students who often find words they don't know. Teaching students how to use context clues (words and pictures) is a great skill. Monitoring stops the problem of reading a whole story and not knowing what happened. Students can learn to stop reading and check to make sure they understand what they just read. If not, it is a good time to re-read the sentence or passage.
Fun and Games
There are quite a few good websites that have free remedial reading activities. The only caution is that some of these games are designed for younger children, so it is important to encourage students who won't feel offended to use these resources.
Starfall is an excellent website. Their games progress from pre-reading, learning to read, enjoying to read, and becoming confident in reading ability. There is also a teacher's section which includes supplementary printable materials.
Scholastic has an incredibly comprehensive game section, and even has games extending further into language arts, math, science and social studies. They have games for all age levels, include pre-k to grade 12. I found that these games were designed for a wide range of abilities and ages, which is great!
PBS Kids has some great games for younger children. Their games progress from learning about letters, to learning about synonyms. All directions are spoken out loud.
FreeReading.net is a great resource for reading intervention for pre k to grade 6. The website has a number activities, as well as resources for teachers. A further review of freereading.net is also available.
Enrichment Activity
Enrichment activities in the classroom offer an opportunity for hands-on, active learning. This is preferable to demo learning, or lecture, where the teacher is often the only active participant. Students who participate in classroom enrichment activities are engaged in active problem solving. Multisensory learning engages a variety of learning styles, and research by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shows that students have more information retention with this form of instruction. Enrichment activities increase student interest in new subject areas and foster a love of learning.
Benefits of Classroom Enrichment Activity
Active Learning
Active learning is desirable because students retain more of the presented information when they figure it out themselves. Instead of a traditional lecture setting, where the teacher presents information and the students absorb it, active learners participate and the instructor acts as a guide and answers questions. Research indicates that students engaged in active learning retain and generalize the information better than their peers in traditional instruction. In addition, enrichment activities give children a chance to experiment with occupations and think about future career paths.
Multisensory Instruction
Students acquire new information in a variety of ways, and most people have a preferred mode of learning. The primary modes of learning are visual, auditory and kinesthetic, also sometimes called tactile. Multisensory instruction engages multiple intelligences, is considered ideal for students with learning disabilities and is beneficial to their non-disabled peers as well.
Cross-Curricular Benefits
Most classroom enrichment activities engage more than one subject area. This reinforces learning in language, mathematics, science, social studies and socialization skills. This teaching style is beneficial because it simulates real-world activities. In daily life, students encounter problems that require multiple areas of knowledge to solve. Teaching activities that mimic this give students practice drawing on their knowledge and applying it in multiple areas.
Examples
Classroom enrichment activities can be as involved or as simple as the teacher's time and resources allow. Some teachers set up classroom centers that extend previous lessons. The centers have activities that student do independently, and often have further reading or audio and video presentations. Others hold science or social studies fairs where children participate in individual or group projects and present them to their peers. A class science experiment encourages students to act out and use the scientific method instead of just memorizing vocabulary about it. Enrichment activities do not have to be in the classroom -- a field trip to an active dig site can stimulate interest in archeology or paleontology.
In school we use the reading counts program. (A pre-requisite to meet before starting the reading counts program is the ability to read the comprehension questions for the book on the computer at school.) Read your reading counts book. Pay close attention to the characters, the setting (the place where the story takes place), the conclusion (how the story ended), story details within the story, defining moments (what happened to the characters, any problems that occurred).
Library
Plan regular visits to the library and plan some time for reading. Consider choosing both fiction and non-fiction books.
Find out about activities planned for children at the library. (Story reading sessions: puppets, etc.)
Internet access is available at the library.