Remedial and Enrichment Activities for Developing Writing Skills

Remedial Activities

Remedial activities are meant to help struggling young learners overcome their writing difficulties. The instruction for struggling students’ needs to begin as soon as difficulties emerge.

What are the advantages of remedial activities? 

Learning Basic Skills

Students who do not have basic math and reading skills will benefit from attention to remedial activities in the classroom. Using phonics, Dolch words or basic multiplication tables as teaching tools will give students the basic skills they need to advance to a higher academic level.

Reinforcement Students who have been out of school over summer, winter or spring breaks may benefit from remedial teaching over a week or more to reinforce skills they lost due to extended time away from school. Teachers might use flashcards, games or fun activities involving phonics and basic math to help students get back on the learning path.

Help for Dyslexia According to research from Carnegie Mellon University, remedial reading instruction can help students with dyslexia overcome their reading difficulties by helping to rewire brain connections. The study, published in the August 2008 issue of the journal "Neuropsychologia," showed that 100 hours of

remedial instruction is enough to help students with reading deficits related to dyslexia increase neural connections and increase reading proficiency over the long term.

Communication Skills Students who suffer from speech disorders may have trouble with communication in the classroom. Speech disorders are often developmental and may respond to remedial reading instruction. Teaching reading using phonics and sounding-out activities may help students with communication issues from speech-related problems become more academically proficient.

Behaviour and Motivation Students who fall behind due to the inability to perform even the most basic tasks in the classroom may develop behaviour problems because of their frustration levels. This can also lead to a lack of motivation and the desire to give up altogether. Teaching remedial activities will help students gain general knowledge that can be applied to all subject areas and help reduce feelings of inadequacy that lead to behaviour or motivation issues.

Enrichment activities? 

Advanced level learners need to develop a greater understanding of genres and the place of writing in particular discourse communities. They also need to develop their strategies and establish their own voice in the second language.

Advantages of Enrichment Activities? 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