English Practice for Beginners

A terrific online resource for beginners is the REEP (Arlington Education and Employment Program) World. REEP is a Virginia-based agency that has been helping adult immigrants and refugees to learn English, job and technology skills for 40 years.

What makes the site so accessible for low-level students is that REEP has made it very easy for these students to access the materials by keeping the written language (including instructions) to a minimum, and maximizing the use of visuals to guide students and help them navigate.

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From Annenberg to You (with Love)

Looking for a way to incorporate an intelligent and cohesive way to teach U.S. history? Overwhelmed by the many websites out there, each with one or two valuable texts or resources? Well, you are in luck. If you are reading this review, you now have access to a comprehensive online curriculum for teaching U.S. history, divided into periods, with excellent primary sources to illustrate key themes and points as well as excerpts from texts written by historians that will give you, as teacher, an in-depth understanding of each period. Continue reading From Annenberg to You (with Love)

Design Your Own Handwriting Sheets

This free website is a valuable resource for adult learners who are learning to read and write for the first time or those transitioning from an alphabet such as Arabic or Chinese to English.

HandwritingPractice.net allows teachers to create handwriting sheets using their own text: letters, words, sentences, or paragraphs. The big advantage is that the handwriting worksheets are customizable: no more downloading pre-made, babyish-looking resources for our adult learners. Teachers can make worksheets relating to “grown-up” themes we deal with in our ESL classes. Continue reading Design Your Own Handwriting Sheets

Word Games!

This page is a wonderful resource for teachers who want a crash course on how to teach vocabulary effectively along with dozens of really fun vocabulary games that can be used for reinforcement and review.

The first pages of the document are devoted to summarizing the main points of Beck and McKeown’s Bringing Words to Life, which has become the go-to book for most educators around the topic of vocabulary instruction. These pages provide teachers with a quick and dirty guide to choosing words, presenting words to students, what it means to “know” a word, and how to review words for reinforcement and application. Continue reading Word Games!