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