ABE: Adult Basic Education

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 now” 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).

This site offers free tutorials and games to learn touch typing. They also offer typing tests for practice.

Every piece of writing is written for a specific audience. Use a blog (an online site that publishes articles in time sequence, newest on top) to publish your students' writing to the world.

This site has many good ideas on study skills for your students. It covers everything from note-taking, remembering, and how to read a difficult book, to writing term papers. It might be a good place to send students at the beginning of the year.

Screenshot of Virginia Tech's list of Study Skills Self-Help Information

In this activity, students will work individually or in pairs or small groups to create synonym charts using the Web site Visuwords.