What is a remedial class? Why do some kids need it?

Summary

Dr. Gayatri, an educational therapist and founder of Flourishing Kids Chennai, explains the purpose of remedial education classes for children with learning challenges. Unlike regular tuitions, these classes focus on foundational skills and systematic, structured learning to address difficulties in reading and decoding words, leading to frustration. They employ multi-sensory instruction involving visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and oral motor components, starting from phonological awareness to phonics, vocabulary, syntax, and comprehension. The duration of remedial classes varies, averaging two years of daily 45-minute sessions, but ultimately depends on the child's progress and needs.

Takeaways

• 📚 Dr. Gayatri is an educational therapist and the founder of Flourishing Kids Chennai, focusing on children with learning challenges.
• 🔍 Remedial education is distinct from regular tuitions, focusing on foundational skills rather than school curriculum repetition.
• 👦 For children with learning difficulties, reading words takes longer, leading to frustration and academic challenges.
• 🏫 Remedial classes are systematic and highly structured, with explicit instructions that are not dependent on the student's grade level.
• 📈 These classes start with basic skills and build up to complex subjects in a step-by-step manner, ensuring mastery.
• 👀 Multi-sensory instruction is a key component of remedial education, involving visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and oral motor senses.
• 👂 Phonological awareness is the starting point, where children learn to recognize and understand sounds before moving on to phonics.
• 🔠 Phonics involves associating sounds with symbols, teaching children the connection between letters and their corresponding sounds.
• 📚 Vocabulary expansion and syntax are also included in remedial education to enhance language comprehension and sentence formation.
• 🧠 Comprehension is a critical part of the process, ensuring that children not only read but also understand what they are reading.
• ⏱ The duration of remedial education can vary, with an average of two years for daily 45-minute sessions, but it ultimately depends on the individual child's needs and progress.

Q & A

What is the difference between remedial education classes and regular tuitions according to Dr. Gayatri?

Regular tuitions are for the same academics students are learning in school, essentially re-teaching the curriculum at home. Remedial education classes, on the other hand, focus on foundational skills and are not directly related to the school curriculum. These classes are especially designed for kids with learning challenges or difficulties.

Why do some kids need remedial education classes?

Some kids need remedial education classes because they have learning difficulties that cause them to process information more slowly, leading to frustration. These classes help them build foundational skills to improve their academic performance.

How does the processing time for reading words differ for kids with learning difficulties?

For kids with learning difficulties, the processing time to read a word is longer compared to good readers. This slower pace can lead to frustration and academic challenges.

What is the structure of remedial education classes as described by Dr. Gayatri?

Remedial education classes are systematic, highly structured, and provide direct instructions. They start with basic skills and gradually move to more complex subjects, ensuring clear and explicit teaching.

Can you explain the concept of multi-sensory instruction in remedial education classes?

Multi-sensory instruction in remedial education classes involves engaging all senses—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and oral motor—to enhance learning and understanding for students with learning difficulties.

What is the starting point of instruction in remedial education classes?

The instruction in remedial education classes begins with phonological awareness, which is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words, before moving on to phonics and other components.

What is phonological awareness and why is it important in remedial education?

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken words. It is important in remedial education because it forms the foundation for reading and is introduced before phonics.

What role does vocabulary play in remedial education classes?

Vocabulary plays a crucial role in remedial education classes as it helps expand the students' knowledge of words, which is essential for effective reading and understanding.

How does the instruction of syntax fit into the remedial education curriculum?

Syntax is included in the remedial education curriculum to teach students the grammatical structures of language, including how to form sentences correctly.

What is the significance of comprehension in remedial education classes?

Comprehension is vital in remedial education classes because it ensures that students not only read words but also understand the meaning and context of what they are reading.

How long does it typically take for a student to benefit from remedial education classes?

While it can vary depending on the child and their learning difficulties, it is suggested that it usually takes about two years of daily 45-minute classes to see significant improvement.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Understanding Remedial Education for Learning Challenges

Dr. Gayatri, an educational therapist and founder of Flourishing Kids Chennai, introduces the concept of remedial education classes and their necessity for children with learning challenges. Unlike regular tuitions, which often reiterate school curriculum, remedial classes focus on foundational skills and are structured to address specific learning difficulties. The approach is systematic, starting from basic skills and gradually moving to more complex subjects, with explicit instructions and a multi-sensory teaching method that engages visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and oral motor senses. The classes also cover phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, syntax, and comprehension, aiming to develop automatic and fluent reading skills.

05:00

🕒 Duration and Effectiveness of Remedial Education

The duration of remedial education classes is typically two years, with sessions lasting 45 minutes daily for five days a week. However, the actual time required can vary significantly depending on the individual child and the nature of their learning difficulties. Dr. Gayatri emphasizes that remedial education is highly beneficial for children facing academic challenges, providing them with the necessary tools and structured learning environment to overcome their difficulties and achieve academic success.

Keywords

💡Educational Therapist

An educational therapist is a professional who specializes in helping individuals with learning challenges to improve their academic skills. In the video, Dr. Gayatri, an educational therapist, discusses her role in working with children who have difficulties in learning, emphasizing the importance of tailored support for these kids.

💡Flourishing Kids Chennai

This is the name of the organization founded by Dr. Gayatri, which focuses on providing educational support for children with learning challenges. It is mentioned in the script as the place where Dr. Gayatri works, indicating the context of her expertise and the services offered.

💡Remedial Education Classes

Remedial education classes are specialized teaching sessions designed for students who need additional support in learning. Dr. Gayatri explains that these classes are different from regular tuitions, focusing on foundational skills rather than school curriculum, and are particularly important for kids with learning difficulties.

💡Learning Challenges

Learning challenges refer to difficulties that children face in their academic pursuits, such as slow reading or decoding words. The script highlights that these challenges can lead to frustration and affect a child's academic performance, which is why specialized remedial education is necessary.

💡Foundational Skills

Foundational skills are the basic abilities necessary for learning, such as phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. The script explains that remedial education classes focus on building these skills from the ground up, which is crucial for children with learning difficulties to improve their academic performance.

💡Systematic Classes

Systematic classes are structured and follow a logical sequence of teaching. In the context of the video, Dr. Gayatri describes remedial education classes as systematic, starting from the basics and gradually moving to more complex subjects, ensuring a thorough understanding of the material.

💡Direct Instructions

Direct instructions are clear, explicit teaching methods that ensure the learner understands what is being taught without any ambiguity. The script mentions that remedial education classes use direct instructions to make sure the children with learning challenges grasp the concepts being taught.

💡Multi-sensory Instructions

Multi-sensory instructions involve engaging multiple senses—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and oral motor—in the learning process. Dr. Gayatri explains that remedial education classes use multi-sensory methods to cater to different learning styles and enhance the learning experience for children with learning difficulties.

💡Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken words. The script describes it as the starting point of remedial education, where children learn to identify and work with the sounds in language before moving on to letter-sound correspondence.

💡Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the understanding of the individual sounds that make up spoken words. The video script uses the example of the word 'cat' to illustrate how children are taught to break down words into their constituent sounds, which is a key component of reading skills.

💡Phonics

Phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing by linking letters to their sounds. In the script, Dr. Gayatri explains that phonics comes after phonological and phonemic awareness, where children learn the association between sounds and symbols, which is essential for decoding words.

💡Comprehension

Comprehension in the context of the video refers to the ability to understand and interpret what one is reading. Dr. Gayatri emphasizes that remedial education classes not only teach children to read words but also to comprehend the meaning behind those words, which is vital for effective learning.

💡Fluency

Fluency in reading refers to the ability to read smoothly, quickly, and accurately. The script mentions that fluency is an important aspect of remedial education classes, where children are taught to read at a pace that allows for automatic and effortless comprehension.

Highlights

Dr. Gayatri is an educational therapist and founder of Flourishing Kids Chennai.

Remediation education classes are distinct from regular tuitions.

Regular tuitions focus on the same academics taught in school, whereas remedial education addresses learning challenges.

Remedial education is not about reteaching school curriculum but building foundational skills.

Children with learning difficulties may take longer to process and read words, leading to frustration.

Remedial classes are systematic, highly structured, and provide explicit instructions.

The instruction in remedial classes starts from basic skills regardless of the student's grade.

Teaching in remedial classes progresses from simple words to complex subjects systematically.

The goal of remedial education is to achieve automaticity and fluency in reading for students.

Instructions in remedial classes utilize a multi-sensory approach involving all senses.

The multi-sensory approach includes visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and oral motor components.

Remedial education begins with phonological awareness before moving to phonics.

Phonological awareness focuses on recognizing sounds, while phonemic awareness involves understanding the sounds of individual letters.

Phonics is the association between sounds and symbols, teaching the alphabet and its corresponding sounds.

Vocabulary expansion is a key component of remedial education to ensure students are not limited.

Syntax teaching is included to help students understand grammatical structures and sentence formation.

Comprehension is also taught to ensure students understand what they read, not just read words.

Fluency is an essential part of remedial education, aiming for speed and accuracy in reading.

The duration of remedial education classes can vary, averaging two years with 45-minute sessions five days a week.

The effectiveness of remedial education depends on the individual child and their specific learning difficulties.

Remedial education classes are beneficial for children with learning challenges.

Transcripts

i am dr gayatri

an educational therapist i am the

founder of flourishing kids chennai

and i work with kids having learning

challenges

today we are going to discuss what is

remedial education classes and why some

kids

need these classes the first thing is

remedial education classes and tuitions

are different

the tuitions which we generally refer to

or for the same academics which they are

learning in school

it is like again they are learning the

same academics at home

and at tuitions but for the remedial

education classes

that too especially for the kids with

learning challenges or learning

difficulties

it is not the same it is not reteaching

the same thing

or it is nothing to do with the school

curriculum

this is like the foundational skills

we'll see

like why some kids need these kind of

classes

first thing for a good reader they

actually

read a word soon they actually take the

processing time to read a word is very

soon

they actually read it very fast but for

kids

with learning difficulties it takes

longer time

so this leads to frustration because

they don't know how to read the word

they are not able to

decode it and read the word so it takes

a longer time and this leads to

frustration

and there are many other academic

challenges because of this reasons

so what actually is soft and remedial

education classes

for the classes these classes are

especially

systematic classes they are highly

structured

they are with direct instructions

instructions are always explicit

whatever we are teaching

will be like very much clear it's not

taken for granted

or anything and this is nothing to do

with the grade of the student

in which class they are in we start with

the basic skills

from the very least to the complex

subjects

suppose we are teaching a small word a

word like

cat the words will start with a very

simple word

where they are first introduced to

sounds and then the word

cat then only we go with the spelling

rules or reading rules and then to the

bigger words

it's not directly we jump into the

bigger words so it is very very

systematic also

then it is all about complete retraining

and mastery

where the kid actually becomes automatic

and fluent

they know everything and they read it

automatically

that is what is all important then the

main thing is

the instructions which we give in

remedial education classes are

multi-sensory

what does it mean about multi-sensory

it is like involving all the senses

together

you see there's a visual input you see

some words

and auditory you also hear and there is

also kinesthetic

sometimes we write it on the note

sometimes we do writing on the

r then we also say the kid also says the

word

so there is oro motor component also

involved

visual auditory kinesthetic

and oral motor so all these together

or in the instructions for the kids

classes in remedial education

what actually is thought so it begins

with the phonological awareness

this is very much before the phonics

phonics it

introduced only little lately

phonological awareness

is back it's all about sounds the kids

starts hearing what sounds are there

what sounds are around them then we move

on to the words

then they start with the individual

letters also

it is the phonemic awareness where they

just only listen to the sounds and they

have to understand what sound is it

you say the word cat they have to

understand what sounds they are made of

then only we proceed with the phonics

phonics is where

actually there is the association

between the sound and the symbol

if we are teaching them a letter

alphabet a

it is the sound is a so this is phonies

also included with this is vocabulary

so that we have to expand their

vocabulary we can't limit the kids we

have to teach them many words also

then syntax is also included where

the grammatical part how to form a

sentence and everything is included

then comprehension path also the kid has

to understand what they are reading

it's not simply reading also so all

these components along with fluency

where the kid has to read at this speed

everything

is taught in this kind of remedial

education classes

so how long does it take if you ask this

question like how long will it take for

the remedial education classes

it is said like usually two years the

classes are for 45 minutes

every day for five days a week but this

is

very average it depends on the kid and

their learning difficulty also

so it completely depends and this is

only a range for the kids

so remedial education classes are very

much useful

for kids with learning challenges thank

you all

you