ABE: Adult Basic Education

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.

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The “Psych Files” provides information about human behavior and is of special interest to anyone studying psychology. In this activity, students listen to a podcast by Michael Britt titled “5 Reasons Why You’re Addicted to Your Phone and What To Do About It” in which he gives reasons drawn from psychological theories on how we learn. Students are then asked to share their thoughts about cell phone usage and what rules they would implement to help control their teenager’s use.

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).