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The Biology Corner
The Biology Corner is a resource site for introductory to more advanced levels in biology. Student handouts, quizzes, and PowerPoint presentations reinforce science concepts. Simple lab investigations give students the opportunity to observe, collect and analyze data, and draw conclusions, all skills for scientific thinking.
Phonics Stories from the Literacy Centre of Expertise
Free downloadable student and teacher books with phonics stories written for adult language learners. This site also contains online picture books for adult learners.
How to Use Interesting Photos to Help Students Become Better Writers
Two teachers explain their routine for English language learners to use “What’s Going On in This Picture?” from The New York Times. This routine helps students learn how to create a claim and support that claim with evidence found in a photograph. They also engage in academic conversations that stimulate academic vocabulary development and critical thinking skills.
Tar Heel Reader
This collection of free, easy-to-read, and accessible books on a wide range of topics. Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using multiple interfaces. Teachers can write their own books using pictures from the huge collection at Flickr or pictures they upload.
ESL Conversation Questions
Find conversation questions grouped by topic or by grammar point. The site also contains ideas for icebreakers and additional online resources for teachers.
Print Discuss
This relatively new website contains printable lists of conversation questions arranged by topic or grammar point. Most conversation lists contain simple warm-up questions and a vocabulary word list.
Arlington Education and Employment Program
This site has extensive resources for teachers and learners, including a full life skills-based curriculum, interactive story links for beginners, and collections of links on a variety of topics including typing, pronunciation, and citizenship.
Beyond Citizenship: True Stories for the Civics Class
These true stories allow students to benefit from other students’ experiences by using the approach of using real life situations as material in the classroom. Each story is accompanied by pre-reading questions, new vocabulary, and post-reading activities to assist students in applying the situation in the story to their own life experiences.
Listen in English
On this website, find short clips of TV shows, movies, news, and academic stories accompanied by vocabulary building activities and listening comprehension questions from beginning to advanced levels. Learners and teachers can make free accounts in order to access expanded discussion activities.
Federal Reserve Education – Critical Thinking
This is an excellent resource for teaching financial literacy and personal finance skills. The collection can be searched using keywords or by applying filters for audience, type, topic, or standards. No account is needed to access all the resources.
Federal Reserve Education – Navigating Systems
This is an excellent resource for teaching financial literacy and personal finance skills. The collection can be searched using keywords or by applying filters for audience, type, topic, or standards. No account is needed to access all the resources.
Story by Story (2008)
Story by Story was developed for Beginning ABE students needing (and wanting) systematic and contextual phonics instruction. However, it has been successfully used with many Beginning-Intermediate ESL students as well. This website provides 12 printable Story by Story lessons that each include the story text, a word study, and sentence-writing exercises.
How to Be a Successful Online Student
ESL instructor Dan Bruski describes how he led his low-intermediate ESL students through a project-based learning activity around composing a list of rules and expectations for their online class. The culmination of the lesson was the creation of a video on "How to be a successful online student," which has an authentic use for orienting new students.
Total Physical Response (TPR): A Curriculum for Adults
Learn about the "how" and "why" of using TPR in the classroom and explore a lesson routine that can be used for a wide variety of TPR topics. A great resource for teachers who are new to incorporating TPR into their lessons.
8 Strategies for Building Relationships with ELLs in Any Learning Environment
Learn how educators can build authentic relationships with ELLs in virtual and hybrid settings, as well as how they can connect students' experiences to meaningful instruction. This article was written for a K-12 audience, but ABE teachers will find the recommendations to be helpful and easily implemented with adult learners.
Reducing Stress and Promoting Mental Health in the ABE/ESOL Classroom
The ideas in this resource were developed through the Managing Stress to Improve Learning project at World Education in Boston, MA. The project was informed throughout by trauma-informed practice and recent research on how the brain is affected by chronic, toxic stress. The authors have tried here to include very practical, hands-on approaches to help teachers practice— proactively and responsively—creating safe and stable learning environments where students can manage their stressors and persist in their learning goals.
Stress Reduction in the Adult Basic Education Classroom
Teachers recognize the value of their classrooms as safe venues for adults to practice healthy coping skills and to develop supports, but they are not always comfortable knowing how to respond to the emotional needs of students. While teachers are not therapists, they can be educated in approaches that promote emotional and psychological well-being, and incorporate strategies into the classroom that help students to learn more efficiently.
Problem-Solving Resources – Robert Kaplinsky
Kaplinsky's website is devoted to helping students become better problem solvers, critical thinkers, and mathematical reasoners. It contains free, downloadable lesson plans that are leveled from K-8th grade, are built around real-life situations, and take a problem-based learning approach. Both Kaplinsky's lessons and Problem-Solving Framework have useful applications inside and outside of the math classroom, and could be used to help students unpack a writing prompt, understand a complex question on the GED test, and so on.
Photocopiables
A site with some well put together grammar resources for both teachers and students. A lot of the material is grouped around a specific grammar topic that is based on a theme to help contextualize the grammar for instruction.
Virtual Math Manipulatives
This resource contains numerous math manipulatives to use in your virtual classroom. Everything from coins to fraction pieces to number lines to algebra tiles – this resource has it all!
New Resources
Climate Generation
Climate Generation offers a suite of Grades 3-12 curriculum resources in the form of curriculum guides, as well as online modules that can be downloaded for free. All of these resources are standards-based and interdisciplinary. In addition, there are lessons focusing on energy use and those using polar expedition journals documenting climate change in the arctic.
Science News for Students
Science News for Students publishes stories about recent research and current events across the full breadth of STEM fields. Power Words are defined at the end of each article.
The Biology Corner
The Biology Corner is a resource site for introductory to more advanced levels in biology. Student handouts, quizzes, and PowerPoint presentations reinforce science concepts. Simple lab investigations give students the opportunity to observe, collect and analyze data, and draw conclusions, all skills for scientific thinking.
Presenter Information
Get information about stipends, reimbursements, and other instructions for presenters.
MN ABE YouTube Channel
The MN ABE YouTube Channel is a free online PD resource that you can use to explore teaching techniques and classroom ideas in action! Find out more in this MN ABE Connect newsletter article.
Upcoming ABE Events
May 17, 2022
12:30 pm–1:15 pm
Online
MN Lunch and Learn: Exploring the New Grammar Section
Online
Registration Deadline: TUE. 5/17/22 In this session, we will explore the new Grammar section in Burlington English and ideas on how you can incorporate it in your class and lessons. NOTE: Attendees must have current login credentials for their BE account. Learn More
Online
May 17, 2022
6:30 pm–8:30 pm
Online
Teaching Reading Vocabulary Remotely or In Person
Online
Registration Deadline: TUE. 5/17/22 Vocabulary is everyone’s favorite reading component! And helping students master reading vocabulary is a key to helping them master comprehension. But how many words should you teach? And which words are the most important? What strategies are best for helping students learn new words?… Learn More
Online
May 18, 2022
6:30 pm–8:30 pm
Online
Accent Bias and Discrimination in the United States
Online
Registration Deadline: WED. 5/18/22 Teachers of adult ESL learners often hear stories of learners trying out their new English skills in the community, and being ignored or rebuffed because of their accent. In this workshop, learn about accent bias research, the politics of accent in the United States,… Learn More
Online