Reading Fluency, Anyone?

One of the main barriers to students’ progress as readers is fluency. If you have ever taught a class in which some students finish a reading selection at lightning speed while others labor along sounding out the text word by word, you have experienced the fluency gap. The comprehension of students who read slowly and laboriously often suffers. These students are putting so much effort into decoding the words, they cannot focus on the overall “message” of the text.

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Science Videos You Can Understand and Use in Class

Short videos can be a great way to introduce or review content learned in the classroom. One of the problems I always face as a teacher, though, is finding videos that are simple, clear, and adult-friendly. In my experience, websites like Khan Academy are too technical and move too quickly to be very helpful to students unless they already know the material quite well and just need a quick brush-up. On the other hand, some of the videos from other sites, such as the Amoeba Sisters, are just too juvenile to appeal to adults.

So I was thrilled to stumble upon the Stated Clearly series of videos on YouTube. These videos are generally short (3-5 minutes or so) and, true to their name, do state concepts very clearly. When it comes to science, my rule of thumb is to teach students what they really need to know, and leave out extraneous information when possible. Stated Clearly videos do just that. The content is served in bite-sized, digestible chunks, and the videos they have put out are nicely aligned with the Life Science concepts tested on HSE tests–cells, DNA, chromosomes, natural selection, evidence for evolution, photosynthesis and cellular respiration, etc.

Stated Clearly: check it out!

Actively Learn

Move over, Newsela. Move over, Commonlit.org… There is a new website in town, and it is devouring the competition. Shout out to Katti Wachs at the LaGuardia Community College Adult Learning Center for calling my attention to Actively Learn.

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Blame Canada for these Excellent ESL Literacy Readers

Lien Buys Food and Inge Cuts Hair are two of the 40 theme-based Bow Valley College Readers available for free to ESL literacy teachers.

Bow Valley College has produced wonderful free literacy readers at seven different levels of increasing difficulty, A – G. There are 40 themed readers in all, covering a range of relevant topics and themes of high interest to immigrant learners. These readers are available in two formats: written and audio at https://globalaccess.bowvalleycollege.ca/esl-literacy-readers.

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Commonlit.org: Uncommonly Helpful

The last decade in the adult literacy field has been one challenge after another. The latest is the new TABE 11/12 (coming to New York State in July 2019). If you are an ELA teacher, you probably know by now that the TABE 11/12 has more than double the amount of reading as the 9/10, with more than twice the testing time, and new, much more complex question types.

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