Oral Communication: An English Conversation Board Game

This board game combines practicing conversational English for adult ESL students with using the various purposes for oral communication (informing, entertaining, persuading, and honoring/inspiring). It will also develop foundational reading comprehension skills through game participation and will develop professional communication and interpersonal skills by allowing discussion of different social subjects that students could encounter in daily life, academic, and career situations.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Game, Interactive

Author: Heidi Kirby

Writing Short Narratives with Sequencing

This lesson is part of a larger project that uses a real-world scenario (sharing stories with preschool students) to motivate and teach ESL learners in an adult education program to write narratives that depict a sequence of events using temporal words. The lesson is intended to help the learners strengthen their writing skills with practice and gain a greater command of the English language for their immediate school and career goals.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Danielle Boulden

Google Docs Lesson

Lesson to introduce Drive and Google Docs to advanced level adult ESL students. Students create their own bio using a template. They will center and left justify, explore different fonts, sizes and colors, use bold and italicize, and insert an image to produce a bio with one-paragraph text.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Sue Ann Rawlins

ACES - Developing a Future Pathway

ACES (Academic, Career & Employability Skills) The goal of ACES is to ensure that Adult Basic Education (ABE) programs are able to provide effective contextualized instruction integrating post-secondary education and training readiness, employability skills, and career readiness at all levels. The Transitions Integration Framework (TIF) is the cornerstone of ACES. It was designed to provide ABE programs and instructors with guidance on the effective integration of transitions skills into instruction at all levels of ABE. The TIF defines the academic, career, and employability skills essential for adult learners to successfully transition to post-secondary education, career training, the workplace, and community involvement. The ACES Resource Library contains tools to help ABE practitioners incorporate the TIF skills into lessons and instructional settings and provides materials that can be used directly with adult learners.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Heather Turngren

Minnesota Literacy Council Curriculum and Lesson Plans

The Minnesota Literacy Council provides a wide variety of professionally written curriculum for adult ESL, adult literacy, and GED classes. The ESL Curriculum includes six months of comprehensive, life-skills based curriculum for pre-beginning and beginning level classes. The units in these curricula are based on themes that are applicable to adult ESL learners, aligned with the CASAS standards, and incorporate the ACES Transitions Skills Framework. Each unit includes explicit teacher instructions, a grammar focus, and printable handouts. GED Science and Mathematical Reasoning curricula are also available, as well as curriculum for employment readiness, technology mini-grants, and citizenship instruction. The site also includes curriculum units that were created in partnership with ECHO Minnesota. Topics covered are: voting, domestic violence, community resilience, tornado safety, and health.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Moving the Cursor on a Google doc T-chart

In this lesson, students will practice using a mouse in order to type onto a Google Doc T-chart .

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Barb Murphy

Sharing Goals and Classroom Expectations using Google Slides

Designed for Adult Basic Education ESL levels 2-3, this is a Google Slides lesson to help students learn how to sign in to email and work on a Google Slide in English.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson, Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jessica Anderson

Money Quiz

This lesson employs the use of a quiz created on Google Forms. When these forms are linked to a website (such as a classroom website) students can access them without needing a username or password. The primary purpose of this lesson to give students experience taking an online quiz, while simultaneously reinforcing academic content. The content of this quiz is Counting Money, although the numeracy goals are secondary to the digital literacy goals.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Sheri Lear

ESL for High Beginning Students: The Way You Like It: Basic High-Beginning Grammar/Writing: Part Two (of Two), Plus Two-Word Verbs, Some Punctuation Rules, and Pronunciation

Book 2. High beginning grammar book in a 5-level series for ESL students. This is the second of the two books for beginners.

Material Type: Homework/Assignment, Textbook

Author: Don Bissonnette

Introduce Yourself Beginning Writing Project

I created a series of lessons that culminate in a student created document of themselves to post in the classroom (mini poster). The lessons focus on student interaction, dictation, grammar, writing, editing, typing and other digital literacy skills. This is more like a project that is broken down into lessons.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan

Author: Kahtryne Chiqui

Newspaper Lesson

This lesson uses Google Docs. Students write WH questions and answer them, based on a newspaper article.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Susanne Kimber

Formatting an Existing MS Word Document

This lesson concentrates on how to format an existing Microsoft Word document. The focus is on meeting the Northstar Digital Literacy skills standards for the formatting of a document (font, font size, line spacing, creating lists, review). The functions required in Microsoft Word are covered and additional functions, such as Save As, Save can also be shown.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan

Author: Brian Faloon

Basic Computer Knowledge - Quiz

This lesson is part of the Digital Literacy curriculum and is taken from the Northstar Digital Literacy standards for Basic Computer Knowledge. The teaching and quiz are designed for ESL Level 1 and 2 students but could be delivered at any level with some modifications. The quiz can be delivered in printed form, particularly with Pre-Lit students.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Lesson Plan

Author: Brian Faloon

Online Learning: Adding MobyMax and Read Theory to the Home Screen on Handheld Devices

Do you use MobyMax or Read Theory in your classroom? This lesson will help ABE/ELL teachers add MobyMax and/or Read Theory to handheld devices for their students. Since these platforms allow ABE programs to count contact hours, it is beneficial to help students access online learning on their phones. There isn't an app to download, so this lesson includes handouts to walk you through adding a shortcut to the home screen for iPhones and Androids.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Christine Wytaske

Grammar-Count and Non-Count Nouns (Part One)

Tutorial on count and non-count nouns with audio, video, examples, vocabulary lists, and quantity word usage.

Material Type: Data Set, Lecture

Author: Farouk Haji and Eyhab Bader Eddin

English Language Centre Study Zone

Study Zone is made up of levels. Each level has language topics (grammar,reading vocabulary, puzzles). Each topic has lessons. Lessons include exercises to help adult students improve their English. There are five levels available: Upper Beginner, Lower Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate, and Advanced.

Material Type: Interactive

Author: ELC teachers

Grammar-Count and Non-count Nouns (Part Two)

Tutorial on count and non-count nouns. Continuation of Part One

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: Farouk Haji and Eyhab Bader Eddin

Noun types and Capitalization

This powerpoint explains 7 nouns types; possessive, common, proper, singular, plural, concrete and abstract.

Material Type: Lesson

Author: Jenifer Rueda

Verbs at Work

This is a PowerPoint of common verbs used in the workplace and at home. It can be used for beginning level English language learners. Part 1 uses clip art of 16 verbs and part 2 uses Brendan Tuttle’s artistic illustrations of 28 verbs. The additional PowerPoint is a handout for students to write the verb under the picture and there is also a list of suggested activities for the teacher.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: Angy Folkes

Using Sensory Adjectives to Write Descriptive Paragraphs

This lesson works well with developing writers to help them learn to incorporate strong sensory adjectives into their writing. Students begin by completing a Five Senses Chart and progress to writing a full descriptive paragraph based on a picture prompt. This material was remixed based on "I Spy": Using adjectives and descriptive phrases by Elizabeth Hutchens. The remixed lesson was created to be used with adult learners. The original lesson can be found by clicking on the link that is included with this resource.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Stephanie Sommers