lesson ideas

While the Book Club won’t meet in December, there is a book that your adult learner can begin reading for the next meeting in January (it’s a little longer than our typical books, hence two months to read it).  The book for January’s meeting is Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.  This is the second installment of Collins’ Huger Games series, and follows our heroine Katniss Everdeen after she won The Hunger Games, and now finds herself the unwitting spokesperson of a potential rebellion against the Capitol.  We ha

Many learners struggle to discriminate between similar letters and words.  They may demonstrate reversals or inversions while reading.  Observe which letters and words with which your learner struggles and create the following activity to help improve visual discrimination:  

Ask the learner to circle the words that are the same.  Note: the word choices may be "nonsense" words.  

Examples: herb    herp    herd    herb    nerb    pig    big    pid    pip    pin    was    maw    saw    was    mas

For an adult learner who needs some English listening practice and has Internet access, we highly recommend eslpod.com.  Learners can go to the site and choose a podcast that is of interest to them. They can listen to it slowly, listen to an explanation of it, and/or listen to it quickly; at the same time they can read the transcript if they'd like. The service is free, but interested students can pay for a basic or premium membership if they would like to receive the "Learning Guides."  

www.gcflearnfree.org is an easy-to-use learning resource for both adult basic literacy and ESL learners and their tutors. Create a free personalized learning profile to keep track of your progress. You can also download the free app to your mobile device! There are over 90 topics to choose from. 

Here are a few of interest-

For a vibrant, interesting, and entertaining website full of educational videos, visit www.openculture.com. You can take free courses on various subjects or languages. You can watch Christopher Walken read books aloud, watch a brief video about a robot that flies like a bird, watch over 450 movies for free online (including classics, westerns, foreign films, indie films, and more). You can download free e-books or audio books, watch rare footage of Samuel Becket, or download a lecture series on Roman architecture. Check it out!