With the exception, perhaps, of adult literacy programs, only rarely will a learning center be the central place where someone learns to read and write. Instead, your work will more often supplement and advance what kids do in their K-12 classes.

This article provides some suggestions and techniques you can use to help kids who are falling behind catch up. Many of the techniques take advantage of alternative learning styles, which kids may not encounter in schools; K-12 teachers also can use the techniques to invigorate their classrooms.

Activity 1: Working With Sounds and Letter Patterns

In their individual or group journals, have kids write all the words they can think of that have a certain sound or that include a certain combination of letters, such as "oi" or "ow." Especially with younger kids and early readers, do this every day with a different sound.

Also try giving them newspaper or magazine articles and have them circle all the words that contain the pattern. This will help them pay more attention to what they see when they read and help them realize how often they see certain patterns. It can be especially good when working with letter patterns that don't always have the same sound, such as "oo" in boom and good, or "ch" in chair and charisma. Chose common patterns so that kids have to do a lot of circling, like "er" and "th," and so that they see how much similarity there is between words.

According to The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, by Edward Bernard Fry, et al., the 100 most used words in the English language make up about 50 percent of all written material; the top 25 make up approximately one-third of all printed material. Concentrate on using these words across your activities, and you'll go a long way toward helping kids become better readers and writers.

Activity 2: Understanding Words in Context

Get an oversized children's book, one that has illustrations and, ideally, a metric or rhyming pattern, such as Wind by Ron Bacon. Before class, examine the language patterns on each page or each two-page spread. Use a scrap of paper to cover up one key word on each page or spread. During class, read the book aloud, and ask the kids for ideas about what each hidden word might be.

Talk about the cover of the book before you start, and discuss the pictures as you turn to each new page, especially when they might give clues to the hidden word. Keep in mind that this is a discussion and vocabulary-building activity designed to help kids learn about words in context, not a puzzle or race to see who can guess the missing word. Keep the discussion going even after someone calls out the right word.

When choosing the words to cover up, make sure they are ones the kids are likely to figure out based on the illustrations, story, rhyme or some other factor, and make the first one or two very easy. Think about the children's age and prior knowledge, and don't assume too much based on your adult education. For example, kids may know words like "water," "ocean" and "beach," but "sea" is not necessarily a word that a 5-year-old may have encountered before, even though you might consider it common. Don't pick something that will derail or frustrate them. Although it's not a contest, kids should feel successful.

After you've finished, take this activity a step further by writing all the hidden words on the board. Depending on the age of the kids, you could now ask them to draw pictures of the different words, draw one picture with all the words in it, write a sentence to describe their pictures, or work on synonyms for each word.

Activity 3: Working With Idioms

An idiom is a word or phrase that is peculiar to certain speakers of a language or that has meaning to certain native speakers beyond the actual words themselves. For example, in some part of the United States, people call bubbly soft drinks "soda," and in other parts they call it "pop." That's an idiomatic difference between regions. More important, especially for classes with non-native speakers of English, we often rely on idioms that don't translate exactly. For example, when we say that we're "putting the cart before the horse," we don't mean that literally; it's an idiom for doing things in the wrong order. The most common forms of idioms are slang words, as well as clichés that, as native-speaking adults, we all know so well that we "shorthand" them. It's important for kids to learn the concept of idioms, because they're how people really talk. Here's a multimedia project on idioms that you can use in class.

Activity 4: Word Substitutions

Where do word activities start and sentence writing activities begin? When the focus moves to the patterns of construction more than the words. We'll cover patterns more thoroughly in discussing writing activities for working on sentences, but here's an activity that begins to introduce the word patterns in a poem. while still focusing mainly on vocabulary.