A reminder that data and statistical literacy are skills necessary on the high school equivalency exams as well as our lives. The CUNY Slow Reveal Graph Collection has over a hundred graphs rendered with a slow reveal treatment, ready to use in class.
There have been many new additions to the collection, especially in the Immigration Slow Reveal Graphs Folder.
Continue reading Slow Reveal Graphs: Current EventsHas this happened to you?
To address these common challenges, we created a handy one-page cheat sheet with simple, concrete ways native speakers can adapt their communication. The document is separated into four imperatives:
I now send this tip sheet to all guest speakers before they visit our class. I still ask them before they are in front of students if I may politely interrupt to quickly explain something important. As much as tip cheat can help, we are still the experts at anticipating what might be confusing for our students!
Explore the tip sheet during meetings with new support staff or HSE teachers who need to communicate with English learners. For example, one tip is to try to avoid the use of phrasal verbs, since they are often confusing for English learners. What are phrasal verbs? It’s helpful to provide a list such as this so that staff understand how often we use them.
Let us know how you use the tip sheet! We welcome feedback!
The folks at the Adult Numeracy Network (ANN) have built a webpage to help adult education teachers bring instructional routines into their math classes.
All of the Instructional Routines in the ANN collection:
At the time of this review, there were supports for bringing the following 34 instructional routines into your classroom:
Continue reading Instructional Routines: A Powerful Tool for Adult Education Math ClassroomsMany of us were dismayed to learn that the Bow Valley readers were suddenly no longer available. Fortunately, we have three other beginning level reading materials that are free and available online. (Save them as PDFs just in case!)
Continue reading ESL Literacy Readers: Australia, Canada and Oakland to the rescue!In Spring of 2021, the Central Office team of professional developers for the CUNY Adult Literacy Program invited students in all of its English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), Adult Basic Education (ABE) and High School Equivalency (HSE) classes to submit writing in response to the prompt: “My Pandemic Year.”
Students at all levels responded with poems and short essays about their experiences. Beginning ESL students wrote cinquains (short five-line poems) to capture their experiences. Intermediate ESL students wrote short essays and HSE students often wrote longer ones.
The student writing here reflects the loneliness, stress, and loss so many of us felt during this extraordinary time. People lost jobs, health, and companionship. Some had to cope with crowded conditions and the tension of too many family members inhabiting a small space, while others suffered from isolation. Parents had to become teachers. One student, a health care worker, saw the ravages of COVID-19 firsthand. There was constant uncertainty, and lots of fear.
Each person coped with the challenges of the pandemic in their own way. Some took the opportunity to focus more fully on their studies. Others learned to bake vegan desserts, developed their spiritual lives, or took up pole dancing. Many writers testified that the pandemic changed their approaches to life–now it was about focusing on themselves and what they really wanted in life.
Continue reading CUNY Students Speak: My Pandemic Year