Activities for Reading

In order for children to learn to read, it’s helpful to have a proverbial reservoir of activities for reading for them to do. Make that, a reservoir of enjoyable activities. Who wouldn’t rather engage in activities that are enjoyable to do? And what sounds like commonsense has the weight of good research backing it as well. Educators and researchers have found, not surprisingly, that a student’s enjoyment of learning directly relates to their desire and willingness to learn. The more enjoyable and interactive learning is, the more likely that a student will engage in that activity.

But the trick is to find activities that are both enjoyable and an effective means of instruction. There is, of course, no point engaging children in activities that are solely enjoyable, with no educational basis, and then expect them to learn something and make gains in their learning. And on the flip side, it is often very difficult to keep kids motivated in educational activities if they do not enjoy them. Researchers have found that kids need to engage in a diverse range of activities for reading, in order for them to gain the literacy skills they need and become fluent readers. But what are the most effective activities for reading?

Activities for reading need to have as their focus five key areas of instruction, which are:

• Phonemic awareness

• Phonics skills

• Fluency in reading

• Vocabulary building

• Text comprehension

Activities for reading which have these five areas of instruction as their focus have been found to be highly-effective in helping kids acquire the reading skills that they need.

The Reading Eggs and Reading Eggspress programs incorporate each of the five essential elements of reading instruction into the structure of every lesson. All of the Reading Eggs activities for reading feature either four or five of the essential elements. Early in the Reading Eggs program, phonemic awareness is highlighted. Later, phonics instruction takes precedence, and so on, moving through emphasis on the other key areas of fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension in their turn.

Each lesson is comprised of a number of parts, featuring a variety of activities for reading, such as phonetic sounding out of letters, phonemic awareness skills of being able to hear the sound of letters as parts of spoken words, letter formation and writing, vocabulary development and reading with comprehension.

The lessons build on one another so that all of the activities for reading within the lesson are perfectly integrated and build upon one another, culminating in the reading of an e-book near the end of each lesson. Each e-book has a cover and pages that turn, mimicking the act of reading a real book, which helps students gain skills in handling physical books, not just e-books. One of the marvelous benefits of the Reading Eggs program is that all of the activities for reading work to help students gain the skills needed to read fluently offline as well as online.

The Reading Eggs program also features a thoroughly engaging, age-appropriate reward system that rewards students for their engagement with and completion of the program’s activities for reading. Children enjoy receiving the prize of Golden Eggs at the completion of the short activities for reading. The Golden Eggs are deposited in their Eggy Banks for them to ‘spend’ in a variety of ways within the Reading Eggs program. They can spend them on games, on clothes for their Reading Eggs online character, or on furnishings for their character’s house.

Students can also collect critters as well as Golden Eggs, with the reward of a three-dimensional, animated critter that hatches out of an egg at the completion of each lesson. This is a rich reward system that encourages students to engage with the activities for reading in order to reap their rewards.

The wide variety of rewards within the Reading Eggs program and the interactive nature of the activities for reading make Reading Eggs an enjoyable, compelling, and thoroughly educational learning experience for young students.

Testimonials

I am very impressed with your wonderful program. Each activity is clearly explained to the children. It is fun and fast moving and also provides a variety of follow-up activities.

- Andrea Reeson, Wingham Brush Public

Reading Eggs is incredible! My daughter can’t get enough of the activities, she enjoys them so much…In just THREE days she started reading the most basic of words. Thank you so much Reading Eggs.

- Arthur

Our students love this site. It is bright, entertaining, engaging and educationally sound. What a fun way to learn to read! They can’t get enough of it and ask regularly, ‘is it our turn on Reading Eggs today’?

- Katrina Kruger, Elliot Heads State School