Flash Cards for Learning

Who doesn't like flashcards? Flash cards can be used by all ages to learn letters, facts, concepts. Flashcards can aid in memorization through the spaced repetition of information. According to Kornell (2009), it is better to space the cards out and do large groups at a time than it is to cram them in and do all your studying in a short period before an assessment.

There are many online sites to access FREE Flash cards and the tools to make your own.
Here are few links:

http://www.myfreeflashcards.com/
-These cards will work for multiple age groups. There are cards on fruit, occupations, words in other languages, math, time, and a variety of subject areas. There are even sets for road signs, which would be great for helping someone working on the driver's license.

http://www.suite101.com/content/make-your-own-flash-cards-a42861
-This site offers tips on how to make your own flash cards. They give examples of what are good questions and how to isolate information in a way that will help someone prepare for a test. They also have links to templates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gCZhYZoS24&feature=related
- You can even find PowerPoint presentations that is just like going through a set of flash cards. This link takes you to one that goes through sight words. There are a few linked to this page that are specifically for early learning and Kindergarten.

Of course, there are also quite a few options for purchasing flash cards and related software. I will leave it to you to explore those options. Please post any suggestions or comments on how you use flash cards.

Math and Family Literacy

Students in adult literacy programs generally want to improve their math skills. Students in family literacy programs often want to improve their math literacy for the GED and to help their children with home work.

Here is a great website to help parents lead their children in interactively literacy activities that help strengthen their math skills! Check out Mixing in Math!

This link takes you to an activity that helps children & adults understand how to make graphs. You begin by coming up with a question for the people around you, like "In what month were you born?" Together you and your child collect the answers, count how many people were born in each month, and examine things about the data. Which month has the most people? Which month has the least? Then, you can make a chart plotting the answers.

This lesson builds math skills in counting, visual literacy, and math vocabulary. It is great practice for school, and everyone in the house can be involved!

Please try activities from this stire in your class and comment on how things went!

Update on Math

Last year, I published several blogs about math instruction and noted there really wasn't much research out there on how to teach math. However, there are recommendations. At the same time I was writing about math, the U.S. Department of Education was publishing a Final Report on the subject of math instruction. Give it a read...

A One Stop for Parent Education

This blog may seem very bland, but it is an earnest attempt to place in one convenient location a series of excellent resources for a curriculum framework for parent education as well as tools for lesson planning.

Equipped for the Future, the Parent Role

Parent Education Profile, a tutorial

Background and Lessons on PEP from the NYSED

The Adult Child Interactive Reading Inventory (an assessment tool and lesson planning guide)

Family Involvement in Storybook Corner

Some of the Research: Family Involvement Can Support School Success

Access to Research-based Information on Early Childhood, School Age, Teens, etc.

Workforce Resources

Teachers are always planning, and I want to make that planning a little easier. Here is another blog entry presenting a few resources that may be useful to the Adult Basic Educator.

First, it is important to begin workforce lesson planning with full awareness that Adult Basic Education is funded through the Workforce Investment Act (link is to the Federal law). WIA is intended to support people with low literacy on to the next step of employment or post-secondary training. Of course, there are many issues surrounding how this has been done since the Act began in 1998 and how it should continue to address the employ-ability and vocational training of people with low-literacy-about 14.5% of the nation's population, but that is a discussion for another entry.

Many good resources for workforce lesson planning are available through the Pennsylvania Department of Education's Bureau of Adult Basic Literacy Education's Workforce Education Recourse Center (WERC). The most basic element of workforce education is development of the soft skills of employment, which can be addressed using WERC's Foundation Skills Framework.

Educators can begin workforce lessons by emphasizing the need for basic employ-ability skills, basic workplace knowledge, and basic workplace skills.

In adult literacy, a lot of time is spent helping people with basic workplace skills like being able to read with understanding, compute and solve problems, and use technology. Teachers may not even realize they are already doing workforce education!

As a teacher, you may spend time implementing project-based learning situations. These can easily help students develop basic employ-ability skills like being able to make decisions, work in teams, and self-manage. However, for some teachers, it may be new to promote basic workplace knowledge like quality consciousness, working within structures, understanding finances, and understanding concepts of health and safety as well as processes and products or services. This is a 'big picture' perspective of how people in different roles function as part of a whole and how we can work independently as well as together to improve quality and maintain a safe and productive work environment. Seeing the big picture can motivate people to perform as well as help them foresee and address issues, which makes them efficient and independent workers.

If an educator wants to implement a strong workforce education lesson, he/she will focus on specific vocational skills or knowledge. Instead of speaking generally about the foundation skills, the teacher can emphasize how a basic literacy skill, basic employ-ability skill, or basic workplace knowledge will fit into a specific job and career path.

For example, information technology. Many jobs require workers to be able to use your standard office suite of programs and moderate typing skills. Teachers may take students into a computer lab and show them the basics of MS Word, so they can type a paragraph to demonstrate their ability to write clearly and concisely. Some teachers may also make use of one of a typing program to help their students gain the skills to complete the task. (There are also free typing instruction games online!)

To make this example even more of a workforce lesson, the teacher could begin with a discussion using information on the tasks of Receptionists gathered from O*NET's Code Connector. O*Net is a resource center describing occupations and careers developed by the U.S. Department of Labor and Industry.

Writing clearly and concisely takes on a more meaning for the adult learner when it is placed in the context of workforce application. Typing and clear written expression are important vocational skills. More information on the development of this career can be found on the O*NET Resource Center link to Career Ladders and Latices.

This is just a sample of how adult basic literacy lessons can become workforce lessons. And, yes, many students will not be interested in job as a receptionist. This is where small groups can break out to explore O*Net to learn more about the tasks and skills required of jobs they may find of interest.

For those who are not sure what job they want, students can explore Career Cruising. Connect with a representative from your local CareerLink (r) to get a password. Students can also explore the Commonwealth Workforce Development System (CWDS) to find out what jobs are out there as well as what training opportunities are available.

Please keep in mind that we can not think of workforce education or the acquirement of information technology skills to be as simple as following a laundry list of skills, like being able to use MS Word and surf the net. Lessons must be linked to express how isolated skills fit together, to learn more about how, try reading, Eisenburg and Johnson 2002. In 1992, Einsenburg and Berkowtiz first wrote their informational literacy curriculum, the Big6, which is a type of triarchic instruction that engages analytic, creative, and practical skills.

Please try these websites for your lesson planning. Feel free to post the results!

Even Start Keeps Moving and Improving

It has been nearly a year since my last post. When I wrote last, I was concerned funding for Even Start would be lost. Since that time, I was introduced to a new accountability measure for Even Start, and the Obama Administration renewed funding!

Last May, there were rumors Obama would cut funding to Even Start because it had not shown much improvement through its performance evaluations. I am not sure what evaluations were referenced exactly, but I speculate it may be the 2-year study completed by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Basically,

"The evaluation found that the CLIO curricula had statistically significant, positive impacts on some of the hypothesized precursors to the development of children’s early literacy skills, including instructional supports for literacy, child social competence, and parenting skills; but did not have statistically significant impacts on the child language development and literacy outcomes. The evaluation also found that the CLIO parenting curricula did not significantly add value to the CLIO preschool curricula with respect to child outcomes."

Even Start is a federally funded program with the goal of stopping the cycle of poverty by helping parents take on their role of first parent and help their child get a better start in school. My argument to this criticism was, is, and has been, that we did not have a good tool to measure what we do AND that we need to have a new conversation about the program model and what can be measured. Additionally, we need more follow-up studies!

Thankfully, we now have a new tool. However, as I have heard in some of the trainings and network sessions I have been to with fellow practitioners, it seems to be taking some time to implement. Some of the challenges are related to questions on how to conduct an intervention with fidelity and how to assess parents who are more comfortable reading in their native languages (languages different from that of the assessor).

If you have not heard of it yet, ACIRI stands for Adult Child Interactive Reading Inventory. It is a relatively new means to assess the ability of a parent to read to his/her child in a way that will improve early literacy skills. It was developed by practitioner and researcher Andrea DeBruin-Parecki, Ph.D. to address the needs of children aged 3-5yrs.

The ACIRI offers a way to look at what I think it the central pivot to Even Start: how the parent engages the child in literacy. I postulate that this may be even more important than the changes in children's early literacy while a family is in the program.

We need to have a larger discussion about the program model and what can actually be measured to show success in Even Start programs. I believe we can implement interventions to help parents adopt the attitudes and behaviors that will keep them in the role of teacher and educational advocate for their child. I think the ACIRI is one may we can assess if they have adopted one set of skills that will help them take on that role.

We have been using the parent education lessons DeBruin-Parecki developed and her observation tool for nearly a year, but we still need to have a full analysis and discussion on the added value as a program. We have seen some parents improve their skills in reading to their children, and we have also seen them become more aware of their role in helping to prepare their child for "the big school." I look forward to hearing more from other programs and researchers across the nation.

EVEN START funding cuts

I am terribly disappointed by the potential loss of federal funds to the Even Start program. I think it is an excellent example of a good program with evaluated with bad or unreliable measures. On paper, it may look very ineffective. However, it has tremendous potential.

In a future revision of this quick post, I will add details and links to help explain why I think Even Start should be funded and how its evaluation should be altered.

You can also find more information on this topic in an earlier post.

Support Adult Basic and Literacy Education Funding!!

Friends and fellow activists!

As you know, Senators are deliberating over the stimulus package. Please call your Senators and tell them to include funding for adult basic and literacy education. Adult education serves people who often fall through the cracks of our public school or who simply need to learn English and possibly did not receive a formal eduction in their home country. Adult basic and literacy programs also provide services to help students develop family literacy practices that will help their children be ready for and succeed in school in addition to classes that help students develop basic workforce skills so they can enter and remain on the job. Over 11 million people in the United States are not literate. We can do something to help people help themselves through adult basic and literacy education.

Please call your Senators and ask them to include funding for adult education in the Stimulus package. You can get their information from Congress.org.

If you are in PA, like me, then please make a phone call today to Senators Specter and Casey, or you can send comments through their websites.

Senator Robert Casey 1-202-224-6324 (phone) 1-202-228-0604 (fax) www.casey.senate.gov/contact

Senator Arlen Specter 1-202-224-4254 (phone) 1-202-229-1220 (fax) www.specter.senate.gov/public

Green Jobs training in Adult Education

Going green seems to be the wave of the future. Just take a look at the many suggestions on how to go green on Discovery's PlanetGreen or Treehugger.com, where they offer a wide array of suggestions for being green from when you buy toys, to how you select beer, and how you buy a home. Green and Save has also published a guide to help you make being green a family affair. Being green is not just good for the environment, it is also good for home energy savings and hopefully for our national economy. Incorporating environmental sciences into your adult education class may help your students work green as well as live green.

We are learning more about how to live green from the media and a basic mantra of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, but what are green jobs and green work skills?? According to the WE Can Solve It site,

Green jobs provide healthy environments for workers while helping build a clean economy. These are good jobs involving work that is often familiar. Plumbers, welders, carpenters and others continue to use their skills, but in fields like renewable energy, sustainable agriculture or green building.

Some adult education programs already offer a curriculum designed to teach basic "soft" job skills. In PA, programs refer to the Workforce Education Research Center's Foundation Skills Framework Resources of basic workplace skills, workplace knowledge, basic enjoyability skills, and lifelong learning skills. Some programs also offer educational services tailored for specific work environments for incumbent workers as part of the PA Workforce Improvement Network program. As unemployment rises with the need for specialized job skills, it is likely many adult education programs will offer opportunities to gain more job-specific skills.

Green jobs are somewhat difficult to define, but they can be found within several of the PA's Workforce Improvement plan's nine clusters including Building and Construction, Advanced Materials and Diversified Manufacturing, Agriculture and Food Production, Logistics and Transportation, Lumber Wood and Paper, and Information and Communication Services and possibly Life Sciences as well as Education. According to the Center for American Progress, investment in green industries have the potential to create a large pool of jobs in 34 states:

The U.S. can create two million jobs and reduce the unemployment rate to 4.4 percent over two years by investing in the green economy

Adult education programs may also be able to find ways to receive funds through the H.R.6759 Renew Through Green Jobs Act of 2008. Alternatively, adult education programs may look to partner with new clean energy power companies, such as ethanol plants, or traditional labor companies who want workers with a specific set of 'green' skills at the entry level in order to develop credential programs or supplement work skills lessons.

If you are a teacher looking to introduce information related to green jobs, you may want to start with the list of green jobs on the Green Collar page at UrbanHabitat.org. This site also has an interesting article addressing the green job of cleaning brown fields.

The Blue Green Alliance web site may be a great place to begin looking at ways to introduce green jobs to students who are already interested in joining labor unions. The Blue Green Alliance also holds leadership seminars in various states, so workers have chance to share their experiences and learn from others. The green-friendly discovery company Treehugger posted an article in July 2008 stating that training for solar panels by Solar Enery International, are on the rise.

I have found additional websites advertising training programs for green jobs, such as the Eco-Academy in Philadelphia, which trains people to be home efficiency experts. People can also get training through the Solar Living Institute in California and at the Wind School in Oklahoma. I am sure there are many more out there. If your students are more interested in activism, they can also explore the Green Corps field school for environmental organizing.
It would be worthwhile class time to ask students to search for training opportunities, and then help your students verify the authority of credentials and the quality of any program before they apply.

Not surprisingly, websites are developing to help match workers with employers offering green jobs, such as SustainableBusiness.com, TreeHugger, and the Environmental job Directory, which links to other sites with postings.

You may also want to try the advocacy sites WE Can Solve It site as well as 1Sky for information on being environmentally responsible as well as on green jobs and the green jobs bill. If you use these sites, be ready to hold discussion that will give students an opportunity to debate issues.

Note: This entry is follow up to a previous entry on green jobs in adult education classes. I have expanded on why I think including green job skills will help students as well as a few more resources to supplement curricula. Be sure to check earlier entries.

Adult Learning Activities | Reading competency and Fluency

Many of the teachers I speak with tell me they want more short reading activities that relate to thematic units. Teachers want to develop reading competency as well as fluency as a part of speaking and listening proficiency. In this blog, I discuss online resources and easily accessible print readings, like the newspaper, as well as activities that can help develop competency and proficiencies in ABE and ESL classrooms. I also located a free online training available to help you develop how you integrate reading lessons in the classroom.

The first two resources were recommended in the Adult Basic Education and Literacy Journal's Spring 2007 volume.

The Adult Learning Activities | California Distance Learning Project offers short stories related an array of thematic topics: money, health and safety, housing, science and technology, working, law and government, family, housing, services, going places, nature, and school. You can play an audio of the story, so students can listen as they read. A few stories also have video.

After entering a thematic topic, you are provided with a list of story titles. These stories are like brief news articles written at about a 4-6th grade level. You can give students the basic story or the full story. You are also given a link to activities to build vocabulary. The activities are all online, but they will give you ideas to develop into a lesson for the whole class if you do not want to/or can not use the website with each student.

You may also want to try the AwsomeStories site. This site is very colorful and has links to different story channels such as Click2Flicks, Click2Disasters, and LawBuzz, which has won a Golden Web award.

The stories can help integrate information on civics and American history as well as health and other subjects into your curriculum. I like the way they graphically present options for selecting stories and the chapter divisions. Although this format also makes it more convenient for students to use the site online than for you the teacher to print the stories and distribute. Unfortunately, not every story as a feature for listening to the story, and there are few graphics. However, words are underlined and link to photos of people or sites with more information on the person, place, or thing.


Keep in mind that the newspaper is a great resource that is often overlooked and can be applied to lessons for English as a Second Language Learners. A great place to access news stories at level for your students is at NewsForYou! This site stays current, so students can read and listen level versions of the current top news stories. You can also subscribe to get paper versions sent to your school. Using these readings should help you launch into W questions (Who, What, Where, When) or Yes/No questions that can develop a sense of grammar structure as well as help launch into critical discussions of current events.

If you want to develop how you include newspapers in your ABE, GED, or ESL classroom, then you may want to take this professional development course offered by Verizon's education network, Thinktivity.

News articles and topic related stories, like those on CDPL, may be a good way to build content familiarity and vocabulary before transitioning into role playing activities. Role playing may be particularly useful for the ESL learner. At this site for ESL speaking activities, you will find various role playing activities and assessment ideas. They also offer an oral test and rubric. You will also find some role playing activities and other resources at the ESL-galaxy site.

One neat site is the English Express: A Website for adult learners. Here, students can select the level of their content. You can print stories as well as listen as you read along. they also have word games, readers stories, and a link to things for teachers and tutors.

My favorite site so far is the Reading Skills for Today's Adults on the Marshall Education website. This site offers a short, printer-friendly reading that students can listen to. The print out has the lines number with the word count to help students keep track of their correct words per minute score (WCPM). You can also access dictation exercises, which are often a shortening version of the reading. The dictation is also leveled, so students can work at the level most appropriate it to their listening and speaking skills.

I think timed oral reading samples are a good way of developing and measuring fluency. If you have students do timed readings, be sure you are also helping them to gauge how well they are reading the words accurately.

I helped a teacher with this type of activity when I substituted for her. I noticed that students were able to easily recognize some words they were mispronouncing, like forecaster and throughout. Other words, they were not really aware they were saying incorrectly, such as saying means instead of meant or say instead of says.

You can ask some students who are more fluent listen to others, which may help develop mentoring skills and a sense of class community. You could also utilize tutors to help monitor student speaking if you can not make time to listen to each student at least once during the time set aside for the activity.

According to the National Institute for Literacy's Applying Research in Reading Instruction for Adults, the timed oral reading samples are a good option for measuring fluency. I am not sure how you are having students chart progress. I noticed Jackie's students like to make a note on their reading to indicate how much further into the text they can read with each attempt.

The NIFL suggests having them read three passages for one minute as rapidly as possible, having them count the words, and then computer the average words per minute for each of the three passages. Next, they count the number of errors in each and computer the average number of words read correctly per minute. For each reading, you have the words read per minute score (WPM) and the words read correctly per minute score (WCPM).

There are a lot of resources available for readings. More things are online. I prefer items we can print as well as those that offer the word count as well as the option to listen to the reading. If you can try some of these sites, please let others know what you think. If you know of other sites that can be used to develop reading competency as well as language fluency, then please post them.

Multiple levels of students in Math and Multiplication

Teaching math in an adult learner classroom can be particularly challenging because the disparity between levels can be very wide. To resolve this problem, our teachers tend to create small learning groups, which can mean the need t0 prepare several lessons for the same day as well as the provision of many smaller tasks (fillers) which students can do while they wait for their turn in the teaching cycle.

Even though the students may have advanced to division and fractions, or even geometry, they may still be lacking some basic multiplication skills. It can be hard to ask an adult to drill the multiplication tables, but they need to have the ability to multiply quickly mastered in order to assist their skill in estimating for division. It is unfortunate that students are slowing working through more advanced problems simply because they did not develop a mastery of the multiplication tables.

Here are some websites with resources to support multilevel class preparation for multiplication. You may want to distribute these activities to the more advanced students as filler to give them time to develop mastery.

The site, Multiplication.com - Multiplication Worksheets, has a nice set of worksheets, flash cards, and links to games you can purchase. I like the quick, 3 minute, 40 question quizzes with the answer sheet below. You can fold the paper and ask the student to take the quiz as 'filler' while you help other students in the class, then go back to review later. The bonus is that the student can check her own work while she waits.

Another site has, as the title suggests, Free Multiplications Worksheets. My favorite here is the blank multiplication table (one is left-handed), but there are many, many sheets with different arrangements of questions.


In case you have this option, there are sites with online games or worksheets where students are automatically corrected. Try the worksheets at 123 Aplusmath.

Adult Education and Technology: Video as a Writing Prompt

Many teachers wonder how they can use technology in the classroom. One way is to use a short video as a writing prompt. I saw this idea in a recent entry on a blog I follow,
Adult Education and Technology, by educational tech enthusiast Marian Thacher.

The video she selected as an example is a montage of cats being silly.

I suggest finding something shorter then 2 minutes and linear in progression--one short progression of an event, not a series of unrelated events. However, you can make that call depending on what you think will work best for your students.

There are many videos on Youtube, and you can select things by looking for subject content relevant to your current class material or themes.

If bringing in video is not an option, you can use photographs. I suggest images from magazines or picture/coffee table books.

Additionally, you do not need to have students write their responses. If you are teaching ESL students, you can have them talk about the videos. Voice of America has great podcasts on short demonstrations. This will build listening and speaking skills.

Activities for ESL/EFL Students

The Internet TESL Journal collected a variety of materials on one site, Activities for ESL/EFL Students (English Study).
Here, you can access activities ranked according to difficulty as well as online crossword puzzles students can do on their own and audio as well as video podcasts.

Voice of America Audio for ESL/EFL: Podcast RSS Feed

Many of the ESL teachers I know want more content that develops listening and speaking skills.
This site from Voice of America, Audio for ESL/EFL, offers podcast programs in an RSS feed, so you should get new material often!

ABLE Resource Center

YES! There are a wide array of resources available at the ABLE Resource Center!

You can find lessons plans, access journals, and request materials. There is a link to things specific to teachers and tutors as well as a link to everything new from the Adult Basic Literacy Education Bureau!!

NIFL- Applying Research in Reading Instruction for Adults: First Steps for Teachers

Applying Research in Reading Instruction for Adults: First Steps for Teachers

Peer Tutoring - Eric Digest

Are you interested in incorporating peer tutoring into your classroom? Maybe you are already using this strategy, and you want to develop ways to assess effectiveness. Please see this report in the ERIC Digest to give you the basics.

Small groups in Adult Literacy - a report

Maybe you are thinking about using small groups in your classroom. Perhaps you already are. Please see this report on Small groups in Adult Literacy and Basic Education from the ERIC digest. The article reviews why to use small groups, the disadvantages, characteristics of effective small groups, and considerations for implementation.

Formulas & Tables at Math.com

Here is a necessary resource for all teachers of basic math, Math.com Formulas & Tables. The format is not the best, as you must print the whole web page to get the tables, rather than click and have access to a nice, printer friendly version.

Math Wars and Assessment in Mathematics

If you are looking for ways to improve your math curricula for adults, it may be useful to understand the historic "math wars," prompted in 1983, as with many education reform debates with the report, A Nation at Risk, and various arguments for assessment and standards-based math curricula.

In the document Assessing Students' Math Learning, published by the Educational Development Center, Inc., you will find a review of the standards-based curriculum, which includes mundane notes such as the inclusion of a rubric and evaluating proficiency. The document begins by noting innovative recommendation from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) in 1989 to include activities for students to work together, for students to spend less time on memorization and more time on concepts, to have activities that use concrete objects to model mathematical situations, and to give opportunities for students to explain math knowledge in speech and writing. The standards were revised and re-released in April, 2000.

In the article, Making peace in the math wars," by Kathy Stanford (2000), we hear more about the formation of math standards and how they have influenced the adult education math standards in the state of Massachusetts.

According to Stanford, the rift causes the math war is a philosophical difference between constructivists and behavioralists. The NCTM standards promote a curriculum based on the assumption that knowledge is contructed during new experiences when individuals develop their own knowledge base for understanding. Behavioralists disagree and argue learning is acquired through drills and practice.

Not everyone is a fan of the NCTM recommendations which learn toward constructivist math or discovery learning. In a letter to the News-Leader.com, on September 16, 2008, one parent/teacher wrote:

Communities all over the U.S. are in the process of, or already have, thrown out these time wasting and failing programs. The parents in Columbia, along with 50 professors from University of Missouri and other schools, have started a petition and are pushing hard to have a traditional math program brought back in to their schools. They have had constructivism longer than SPS are seeing math test scores fall precipitously due to it.

The Standards-based math has been adopted by schools with the help of funing from the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 1991. In a more thorough argument, as Barry Garelick also pummels the discovery learing method in his feature article, An A-mazing approach to math, which also offers an account of the politics of the math wars in terms. Garelick also points out the simple problem with the discovery learning to math approach, when applied in the elementary grades, students do not internalize the basic facts which make more complicated computations a breeze, for example: with the question of "what is 8 times 7," a child may add 8 seven times rather than rattle off the expected 56.

In terms of how constructivist theory applies to an adult math curriculum, Stafford says her "zeal" has diminished with time and experience; however, she reminds us that and andragogy for the adult learner should work to bring mediate the broad base of life experiences and knowledge with class content.

Despite this push for connecting the concept to the practical application, I think there is still a voice for the traditional approach of drilling, where the need to acquire the base of knowledge to approach a problem is needed in order construct the knowledge of how to use the concept.

The question that stands before teachers I know is how to tailor the necessary drill to acquire facts to resistant students?