ABE: Adult Basic Education

Source: TED Ed Overcoming obstacles - Steven Claunch (License: CC0/Public Domain)

TED-Ed is an online library of lessons as extensions of the inspirational TED videos. There are two types of lessons: those already created lessons and lessons you can create from any educational video on YouTube.

For this activity, students watch a video titled Overcoming Obstacles (above). They then write a summary of what they watched and how to apply it in their own lives.

Source: The Free Dictionary (License: CC0/Public Domain)

Using this site, students will practice vocabulary by learning and using the word of the day, playing the spelling bee, and looking up two idioms and one acronym. Students can customize their page to include as many features as they like. Other features included in the side menu include a thesaurus, medical legal and financial dictionaries, acronyms, idioms, and encyclopedias.

This Web site is rich in possibilities. Beyond vocabulary practice the site offers a variety of dictionaries in various languages (Spanish, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, Russian and Turkish). There are games to play: Hangman, Spelling Bee, Words Within Words, Matching. There are also great sources of information: Article of the Day; In the News; This Day in History; Today's Holiday; Today's Birthday; and Quotation of the Day.

Source: NPR's This I Believe (License: CC0/Public Domain)

If you listen to NPR radio, you may hear both famous and unknowns discussing their core values and beliefs on weekly broadcasts of the radio spot “This I Believe,” a take-off on Edward R. Murrow’s original 1950s radio show. The site is an archive of all the modern broadcasts accompanied by the original print essays and contains a searchable database of thousands of other essays on numerous topics ranging from patriotism, to family, to sports. Each short essay that has been broadcast on NPR has a “Listen” link to hear the authors read their essays, which provides a listening component for the ABE student. The audio can be the basis for exercises on note-taking, listening for main ideas, supporting details, and cloze (listening for missing words).

In this activity, students learn about photosynthesis through a introductory video and three online activities. Along the way they learn to interpret diagrams that describe the process of photosynthesis, examine the ingredients and products of photosynthesis and identify producers and consumers in the food chain. Each activity has several quiz questions to check for understanding. There is also an online quiz covering all three activities.

Source: http://www.tv411.org/science/tv411-whats-cooking/photosynthesis-science-lesson (License: Protected by Copyright (c) [i.e. screenshot])

 

These activities work best in a computer lab; however, students can be divided into groups on several classroom computers or the activity can be projected on a screen for the whole class.

Life Science is approximately 40% of the GED Science test, and 50% of the HiSET Science test.