Adult Literacy Resources
February 28th, 2008 by admin
One of the greatest challenges of teaching adult literacy is finding appropriate practice activities for each skill and level. Teaching resources abound for younger students, and it’s usually pretty easy to find games, worksheets, and resources to match nearly any need. However, adults who need to master the same skills are far more difficult to accommodate. Many commercial materials are babyish and seem quite immature to these learners. Stories are themed around children and school, rather than topics relevant to adult life. Tutors, literacy volunteers, and adult education teachers need more options for materials.
A few educational publishers are moving to meet this growing demand. High Noon Books puts out a series called “Starting Gate” that gives the lowest level readers a chance to successfully read short stories with adult ideas. The stories about eating out, working in the market, going on vacation, and so on are suitable for adults of limited ability, such as the developmentally disabled. The Go Phonics Decodable Storybooks are also suitable for students of all ages, and help beginning readers practice specific phonics skills, such as long or short vowels, r-controlled vowels, and vowel digraphs/dipthongs. The reading levels for both of these series hover around mid to late first grade level through second grade level, and they are very nice for struggling or very early beginning adult readers. Both series are available from the Reading and Language Arts Centers catalogs: www.rlac.com.
The internet can also be a wonderful resource for finding adult literacy materials. For example, New Readers Press is the publishing arm of ProLiteracy. They offer materials for a wide array of adult levels, from preliteracy on up through GED Preparation. They even have ESL materials to offer. Check out Awesomestories for some high-interest, low-vocabulary stories based in current affairs and history. Here’s a page with lots of other resource ideas as well: Harness Reading.
The resources are available, even if it does take a bit of a treasure hunt to find them. If you know of any adult literacy materials that you find helpful, please drop me a note and I’ll add them to the list. Thanks for your help!
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© 2005 Sandra Fleming
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Adult Literacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
