Learning Styles

A great video about learning styles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu24QNtRado&feature=related

More from Adult students

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b-M7plrGI0&feature=related

See what adult learner Valerie says about overcoming her literacy issues.

Literacy: A Student's View

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUxqXgCT9hs&feature=related

see how an adult student sees his own literacy challenges and what he does about it.

Pride of Learner

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNdaKF_qNoo&feature=related

Commercial showing pride of the adult learner.

Gremlins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8JHeIS5Lo8&feature=related

Great literacy commercial from the UK about how learners put off the learning they know they want.

Press the Right Key Please

A very simple game to learn keyboarding skills.
http://www.bigbrownbear.co.uk/keyboard/index.htm

How Fast Can You Type?

http://sense-lang.org/typing/games/BalloonG.php?key=EN&letter=0

This is a great game for someone who is trying to improve their keyboarding skills. Try it yourself and you will remember how stretched you are to reach keys like:
/ z + , and so on.

If your learner is still hunting and pecking on the keyboard, that surely slows him or her down. Why not try ending your session with this fun game, give the brain a rest and just have fun.
That is why we have a computer in the tutoring room, so that you can wind up your session with a little enjoyment.

Read and Hear

Voice of America news has articles your learner can read and listen to at the same time.

Informative articles and fun reading and listening at the same time.

Check out this article on bedbugs. (More than you ever wanted to know).

http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/theclassroom/articles/in_the_news/With-Bedbugs-Some-People-See-Pests-Others-See-Profits-105800443.html

New Volunteer Training Course

We are offering our yearly training course for volunteer literacy tutors soon. Starting on January 12 it will run 7 Wednesday evenings - 3 hours each time. There will be 3 additional sessions after the basic training. These will be arranged later on.

We cover exciting, hands-on skills that tutors know to get started:

• working with the adult learner
• reading, writing and working with numbers
• great on-line resources
• designing lesson plans

Each evening is fun and lively and the tutors from the past who took the course seemed to enjoy it.

So, if you know someone who has been thinking for a while about becoming a volunteer tutor for adults - just get them to call me - 604 413-1021 and I can tell them all about it.

In the meantime, you tell them all about how you like being a tutor.

Thanks

Deb

Flash Cards

Here is a site that has lots of math ideas and activities on it. Check out the online flashcards that pop up. Also try this below, it is a way to create flashcards.

http://www.aplusmath.com/Flashcards/Flashcard_Creator.html

Learning Without Borders

http://www.literacybc.ca/Research/LearningWithoutBorders.pdf

This is a comprehensive document with all kinds of ideas in it. Take a look at the tutoring section if you want, there are some great ideas there.

Typing and Keyboarding Games

http://www.manythings.org/vocabulary/games/l/

Go on, you think you have good keyboarding skills, try this game to see how you keep up. Lots more at this site. I think this could be fun for spelling games too.

AS or LIKE? Which is it?

This has to be the biggest set of exercises for ESL that I have ever seen. I think some of it might be used to teach grammar too.

http://www.tolearnenglish.com/cgi2/myexam/index.php

Moving the CALL office

This is just to announce that the CALL Tutoring Office will be moving from the Model Community Office above the bowling lanes. We have the opportunity to create a Literacy Centre at the Prep Offices above the Bank of Montreal on Marine near Alberni.

We will be moving sometime in November; I will give you a heads up the week we will be closed, still to be determined.

The new address is:

PREP

103 - 4511 Marine Avenue

Powell River, BC

V8A 2K5

604 485-2004

It will be a nice new space where the Literacy Outreach Coordinater, the new Settlement and Assistance Coordinater, myself, and of course, you tutors can all have space together.

Survival Guide ESL

http://www.elsanet.org/site/wp-content/uploads/pdf/literacy_guide.pdf

For all you tutors out there working with ESL learners, you might find something useful in this guide. It is actually written for instructors, but there are some good tips in there. Take a look when you have a moment.

Learning the Times Tables

Here is a way to make it easier. This game starts off with simple questions and builds to higher multiplication times tables.

Try it:

http://www.cyanova.com/math/MathStax.htm

Read a Simple Story

One of our tutors put me on to this site.

http://www.literacynet.org/cnnsf/archives.html

You can look at a news story, find an abridged, simpler version and then answer questions about the story, do some sequencing, come to some conclusions.

This could be useful for a lot of you tutors. Have a quick look

Basic Computer User

http://www.bbc.co.uk/computertutor/computertutorone/index.shtml

Doesn't the BBC produce great stuff. This is for the very beginner who wants to learn how to use a computer. Good and slow and nicely paced. Fool around a little and then think who this would be perfect for.

Listen and Read

http://www.englishexpress.ca/

This is a site from Alberta. There are all kinds of little stories with audio attached so that the reader can read and listen at the same time.

They are read nice and slowly. Try a few.

Live Newscasts

http://www.youtube.com/voalearningenglish

You can see live reports on youtube with words written underneath. Perfect for someone learning English or for someone improving their reading. Try out a few of them.

Couch Potatoes

Voice of America. You can listen to a reading that describe idioms, like couch potato. Your learners can listen to this and practice their pronunciation or you can read the text.

http://www1.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/words-stories/Words-and-Their-Stories-From-Couch-Potato-to-Cabin-Fever-89327752.html

Important message about the summer

Dear Tutors

I hope that you are enjoying your matches with your learners. I just want to tell you about the upcoming summer.

As some of you know, I don’t work in July and August, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop tutoring unless you are meeting at the VIU tutoring room in the evening. (daytime tutors just check with Linda Rosen, it should be the same)

At the Model Community Office just carry on in your same time slot and all should be well.

At Breakwater Books, just take a moment to reconfirm your dates for the summer.

Sorry VIU campus is NOT open in the evening so the tutoring room won’t be available. An alternative would be to meet at the Step Above Café at Quality Foods where we have been invited to do our tutoring.

Some tutor/learner pairs carry on right through the summer; but it is more common to arrange some break time. A few weeks off for a holiday is absolutely what we expect you to take and please arrange this with your learner. Vice versa, sometimes learners also have holiday plans, so please talk to them in June to see what works for both of you.

Even though I am not working, if something urgent comes up please call me at my cell 604 413-1021. I cannot promise that I will get back to you the same day, but I will try.

Also you can email me at call@prepsociety.org

During the summer I don’t do any assessments for new learners, but right now there is a waiting list, so if and when you end the tutoring with your learner please let me know.

If you become unavailable for a period of time please let me know that too.

And last, I want to thank you all for your hard work. The VIU program has been going more than 20 years, but CALL (my program) is only in its second year. Last year we made 5 matches; this year we made 13, imagine next year. So thanks again for being there and caring enough to help.

Deb Calderon

CALL (Community Adult Literacy & Learning)

ESL Survival Guide

http://elsanet.org/pdf/literacy_guide.pdf

This is the Adult ESL Literacy Resource

Survival Guide for Instructors

although it is meant for classes it has some super ideas in it.

Here is one

How to Boost Learner Self Esteem

Keep a portfolio of learner’s work. Let learners chose their best work for the portfolio, date each entry. Review the portfolio from time to time to show learners how they have progressed.

Use a self-assessment activity at the end of a week, month or unit. Have learners respond to a checklist. After doing a unit on health have learners check:

CAN YOU ...

YES

SOMETIMES

NO

spell body words

√

make an appointment

√

say you are sick

√

Do this orally and with graphic prompts. After, you can conference with your learners about their abiltities.

Give learners choices on activities. Do you want to read or write? Do you want to work in groups or pairs? Do you want to go on fieldtrip

Best of the West Coast Reader

you all know the west coast reader, that fabulous resource we use. Well now you can go through some ebooks from the same folks. They are good for the beginning reader or ESL learner and have teacher guides.

Check out a few and see which ones you like.

http://bestofthereader.ca/

Adding Decimals

http://www.math-play.com/Decimal-Game.html
Here is a great game for adding decimals.

Ordering Decimals

http://www.mathsonline.co.uk/nonmembers/gamesroom/awards/awardc.html
Having trouble figuring out the order of decimals. Try this fun awards game. It is easy, I tried it and it takes a bit of thinking, but you can get it.

Dang! I Got Hanged.

http://www.englishclub.com/esl-games/hangman.htm

feel like a good game of hangman. Try here.
Good for ESL students or people working on their spelling.

Stash the Cash

Here is a great dice game for basic math skills. All you have to do is change the British pounds to dollars and you can play the game.

http://www.skillsworkshop.org/l1num/e3l1l2stashthecash.pdf

The website it comes from is huge, have a look around there.

http://www.skillsworkshop.org/whatsnew.htm#aprfunctmath

Graded Readers

A graded reader for beginner level ESL learners.

http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/first.html

Odd Man Out

http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/discaltv.html

here are some upper level ESL activities. Fun and easy.

Math Brain Teaser

Here is a cool guy, Video Math Teacher

http://fr.video.yahoo.com/watch/6467936/16769731

He has a series of brain teasers that are just fun to use to warm up the brain when you are doing a math lesson.

All you tutors doing math, check some of his lessons out too, he has some good explanations.

TV and Literacy

http://www.tv411.org/qt/

This is pretty cute. The story of a chef who had trouble with literacy. He explains ratio really well and is just charming.

After you have looked at this, go back to the site home and explore some of the other good resources.

Monthly Reports for CALL

If you are working with me, Deb, the monthly tutor-learner report is due for just after the end of the month. Linda's tutors don't fill this out, just my gang please.

Check your in box for mail, I have already sent one out to you, but let me know if you want me to send it to you again.

.

(This is what it looks like)

Call

Community Literacy & Learning

Learner and Tutor Monthly Report

To be completed by learners AND tutors together

Report for ______________________________________

Month year

Learner ________________ Tutor ___________________

Which of the following locations did you sue for your tutoring sessions?

Community Resource Centre

Family Place

Book shop

Model Community

Approximately how many hours did you spend per week in your sessions?

Learner ____________ (including homework)

Tutor ____________ (including prep)

What did you work on this month?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

What do you plan to work on next month?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

Please list the learning resources that you found most useful this month?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

What other learning resources would be helpful?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

Did you use any of the resources at:

VIU

Powell River Public Library

Can you recommend any resources for our program?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

What worked well in your tutor/learner partnership this month?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

What presented challenges this month?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

Is there anything else we can do to support your partnership?

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

Would any workshops be useful to you?

Tutors

Learners

Thank you for filling this out.

Deb Calderon

Coordinator CALL

Any other thoughts or ideas you have please feel free to leave them here.

Mission Accomplishing

I found this little section in a good tutoring book (http://www.nald.ca/Clr/demyst/chapter6.htm#start). I think it reminds us of how important it is to keep working with the learner on positive gains.

Help the learner recognize how much they are learning and how much progress they have made by :

• Keeping a progress chart of new words learned;
• Creating a portfolio of their work, dating each piece to show progress over time;
• Reminding them of the gains they have made;
• Giving them an opportunity to practice their new skills in meaningful situations (ie. practicing alphabetizing by looking things up in a phone book, index, dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.);
• Having them read to children, elders or others as they are able to;
• Rewarding them with a certificate of achievement at certain times in the program, especially when specific goals have been achieved;
• Keeping a dialogue journal in which they reflect upon their learning experiences. You respond by affirming their feelings, praising their progress, and encouraging them. The fact that you can dialogue with each other in writing will be rewarding in itself.

Big Honking ESL Resource Site

http://www.nald.ca/resource/educational/category.asp?cat=9

Wow, there are so many links here for you ESL folks that you can be busy for quite a while. Take a look. I will find a favourite soon.

http://www.eslpartyland.com/dating/advice.htm

All right my favourite, it is ESL party land, where you can learn the language of cool, including dating. Fun and pretty relevant.

English grammar

http://www.englishpage.com/

We have listed this site before, but if you have an ESL student have another look at it. You can play games with verb tenses and it will give you lots of ideas for english and grammar.

Find anything good let me know.

ESL ideas

http://a4esl.org/

here is a good website with a variety of activities suitable for English learners at different levels. Try a few of them to get the feel.

Here is another site with some good ideas to break up the paperwork. Some miming games, some card games and all kinds of good ideas.

http://www.teflgames.com/games.html

Topic Sentences

I went looking online for some activities or videos about topic sentences or sentence structure and found these. Have a look.

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/fwalters/para.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzM6Wx2bhU4 (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFwQJSZ2wJA&feature=related

Relevant and Practical

http://measureup.towes.com/english/assessment_acts.asp?skill=document_use&level=2_3&seed=4

These are really good practice sets and assessments for work and trades.

You can get your learner studying time sheets, figuring out the shipping and receiving order, understanding the ingredients on a bottle of hair colouring and much more.

The learner can do some self assessment and there are many ways to practice. Good for construction and other working trades.

Spend 10 minutes there working in reading, using documents and numeracy.

Read aloud newspaper

Listen to some of the information at this newspaper designed especially for adult learners.

http://www.thewclc.ca/edge/issue1/onthenet/learningedgeonweb.html

Real English

http://www.real-english.com/new-lessons.asp

This is a good site for people who are learning English, both beginner or intermediate.

There are also exercises and, even though they can be done with a microphone, you can still learn a lot from the exercises.

Fractions explained

Found a nice math site that runs the gamut from hard to easy.

www.coolmath.com


I particularly liked the fractions and how they explained it. But there are so many games and activities here you might be on the site for a while. Have fun.

What the Heck is a Gerund Anyhow?

One of our tutors found this page to most useful.
www.englishpage.com

There are all kinds of little lessons and tutorials on parts of grammar, vocabulary and much much more. Have a look.

Want to Make Your Own Flash Cards

it is so easy to make online flash cards.

http://www.scholastic.com/kids/homework/flashcards.htm

Simply go to this site and pick numbers or words.
Then you write one thing on the front of the flash card and something else on the back.
You can make cards and your learner can even use them at home.

Tutor Picks #2

At our internet training night the tutors went through dozens of sites. These were the ones that really caught their eyes.

sightwordswithsamson.com

all kinds of online activities

teachervision.fen.com

many printable worksheets

puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com

great crossword generator at this site

http://cdlponline.org/

A great many story sites.

http://www.lumosity.com/

All kinds of brain games

Tutor Picks #1

GCFLearnFree.org

This was a very popular site at our last tutor internet exploration night. The everyday lessons were really good and very relevant. You have to sign up for this site, but it is well worth it.

Check out the money lessons and the computer lessons. They are all really worthwhile.

Main Idea

Finding out which sentences in a paragraph contribute to the main idea and which ones are not necessary is a great way to approach comprehension.

http://www.instructorweb.com/linkgo.asp?L=253&B=resources/reading.asp

Try this activity. Then look at the top of the page and Go Back to the Instructor Web to see lots of other good activities.

Getting to Know You

http://www.ncsall.net/fileadmin/resources/teach/jacobson.pdf

A really good section on how to get to know your students, or in this case, student. Some good insights in this document.

Plan Language Test

Here is a wonderful way to test whether your document is written in clear enough language.

http://www.eastendliteracy.on.ca/clearlanguageanddesign/readingeffectivenesstool/

Try it out and see how well your writing is getting the message across.

Conversations

http://www.eslfast.com/easydialogs/index.html

Such simple conversations for beginner English speakers.

Literacy Tools

I think this site is from Ireland. They do an amazing job of literacy work there and the website reflects it. There are games and printable worksheets for spelling, reading, math, etc.

There are also simple reading documents, for example, the one about mammograms explains the procedure and ends with some questions and a game.

Check it out.

http://www.literacytools.ie/home.cfm

Chateleine Writes

http://en.chatelaine.com/english/weekend/article.jsp?content=20091101_140000_0024

Chateleine has an article about six adult learners and mentors. The learners have done their own writing, and it is interesting to read. Take a peek.

New to the Country

A very nice video that shows how ESL learners feel before and after getting help from a tutor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNNwlRR79t8&feature=related

So many links

This is a HUGE page of links of games online for reading, breaking down words, word parts, suffixes, prefixes and much more.

I played the game Word Wheels which I found easy for the word part, hard for the game part, but sort of challenging. Pick a couple of games from this site, try them out and leave a comment.

Every bit of review helps.

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/literacy.html#5

Say and Speak

Here is a lively site that you can send your ESL learners to. They only have to look under content to find a topic that interests them; animals, body, etc.

http://www.learningchocolate.com/content.php?topic=Body

Then they click on that part of the picture and a voice says the word.

This could come in handy when learning new vocabulary.

Now if you want to drive yourself crazy with a clothing jumping game, here it is.

http://englishflashgames.blogspot.com/2008/08/clothes-game.html

get your body under the clothes that they describe and jump up using the space bar. It is fun and a little hand/eye coordination never hurts.

Last, you just can't beat a good game of hangman. Whether your learner is ESL or just working on words this game is always fun.

http://englishflashgames.blogspot.com/2008/05/hangman.html

Don't forget that you can use the office above the bowling lanes with your learner if you book it with me. It is nice and quiet and private and it has a computer that is online.

You can also find computers at the library and the Community Resource Centre (open afternoons). If you know of any public computer sites that learners could use, please let me know.

CALL has a new address

we have moved the tutoring office. So I hope a few of you will end up working with your learner at our lovely new home. We have a small, but nice office on the second floor above the bowling alley on Marine.

We are in with the Model Community folks, right above the bowling alley. The room is available 9 - 4 pm Monday to Friday at 4476 Marine Avenue.

It is basically up Courtenay St. up behind the bowling alley and then down a lane to the parking lot.

Call me at 604 413-1021 if you want to make an appointment to drop by.

New Tutoring Course Started

We have about 20 wonderful new people in the new tutoring class. 7 weeks from now we should be able to bring a whole new crop of tutors to the learners of Powell River.

We appreciate so much how generous all our tutors are with their time.

Thanks to all of you.

Making Change

If your learner is having trouble with making change and other money problems you might like to try this website:

http://www.funbrain.com/cashreg/index.html

If you start with the easy set you can help them build their confidence and it is really not very threatening. I tried it and found it easy to make change.