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Reading Center Activities

Independent Reading Activities Students Can Complete

Dec 23, 2008 Jennifer Wagaman

It is important to have activities to include in your classroom's reading center that will improve student comprehension.

While you teach a small group of students during reading class, you must have a variety of activities that students can independently complete. These activities should not be simple busy work, but should teach and reinforce student learning. The following activities are some ideas that will help students practice their skills, learn new vocabulary and improve their reading comprehension.

Write Another Chapter

Another option is for students to write an additional chapter for the book they finished reading. What information would the next chapter include? Think about what the characters would do. This is a great opportunity for students to change something about the story, or add missing action or details that they would have liked to see in the story. Depending on the grade level, you can require a different amount of writing for the extra chapter.

Write a Different Ending

Have students rewrite the ending to a story or book that they finished reading so that the story ends differently. This requires creative thinking, and will be a great opportunity to extend lessons from writing class into reading class. This connectivity between subjects is important to show students even at a young age. This activity also helps to reinforce reading comprehension as students must understand what happened and why, in order to create a believable new ending to the story.

Find Synonyms to Six Favorite Words from the Story

Have a thesaurus handy in your classroom library or in the reading center, to help enrich student vocabulary. Activities that require students to find new words that mean the same thing as other words they know will also help to improve reading comprehension, as students will come to understand more words as they read. This is a great activity to help improve student handwriting as well.

Write a Dialogue

Have students choose two characters in the story to write a new dialogue between. This helps teach students how to develop characters in a story, as they must make the interaction realistic. It will teach students proper punctuation for dialogue as well. You can provide additional requirements for the dialogue as well, for example, the conversation must demonstrate how the characters would resolve an argument, or must demonstrate that one character was surprised by something the other character did.

Organize a reading center in your classroom with a folder or check list of activities that students must complete. Have them sign their name to the activity on the list after completing it so that they do not do the same activity over and over again. Providing a variety of skill building activities will result in the greatest student learning.

Learn more tips for teaching reading.

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