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Math interactive lessons K-8th level

Hey --

Occasionally it's fun and challenging to hone our math skills. Visit www.aaamath.com. This site features comprehensive sets of interactive math lessons. Unlimited practice is available on each topic and allows enough time to master concepts. Pick from a wide range of lessons (Kindergarten through Eighth grade level) which enables learning or review at each individual's current level.

Sue

National Volunteer Week

In celebration of National Volunteer Week, Project Read salutes the hundreds of volunteers who make our program possible. We are indeed grateful for the people that are you are and the work that you do. You inspire us and the students we serve every day!

Allwritingideas.com

Do you ever get stumped coming up with creative writing ideas for your students? Have we got a solution for you! Check out the web site http://allwritingideas.com for picture writing prompts, blogging ideas, journal writing prompts, fiction and poetry inspiration, and more.

For example, here's a recent post with ideas for journal writing prompts about crying:

Write about the last time you cried for a silly reason.

Haven’t you ever cried for a silly reason? Then here’s another journal writing prompt for you: make a list of things that would never make you cry.

You could also reveal how you react when you see someone crying for reasons that you wouldn’t deem worth a single tear.

Most prompts on this site are short, sweet, and to the point, although they do also offer longer articles with general ideas about writing prompts.

Happy writing!

Writing Contest 2010!

An ancient proverb says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Regardless of the artist’s original intent, what we see in the picture can be very different from what others see. What words would you use to describe what is happening in the picture? Use your imagination and experience to speculate what the story is about or describe what is happening.

We are once again going to ask you to be creative. We have chosen five pictures (below) for you to use as a springboard for writing. Choose one of the following picture prompts and express yourself in writing. How does the photo make you feel? Write a poem. Write a fiction story about the subjects of the photos. Research the background of the objects in the photos. Or think of an experience you may have had similar to the one portrayed in the photo. Be creative!

Whichever image you choose, explore it from as many perspectives as you can. Be adventurous; surprise yourself. Try to generate as many different associations as possible. We look forward to seeing your work.

Project Read will divide all entries into three categories: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each student may submit up to one entry per category (maximum: 3 submissions). Please include your name and the category (fiction, nonfiction, or poetry) on each submission.

Prizes will be given for the most outstanding entries in each category. Prizes will be awarded at the Project Read Summer Party on Friday, 4 June 2010. Please submit your entry to the Project Read office by Thursday, 20 May 2010 to be considered for the contest.

To download this information as a .pdf, click here. Tutors, click here for specific information regarding rules and regulations.

Good luck!

Help Project Read raise $5,000 in a simple way!

GoodSearch will donate $1 for every toolbar that is downloaded between April 6th at 9am EST and April 9th at 9am EST up to $5,000!!

Please download the toolbar right now by following this link:

http://www.goodsearch.com/toolbar/project-read.

Our new Project Read toolbar is free to download and allows you to raise money for our cause every time you search or shop online! Once added to IE or Firefox, each time you shop at more than 1,300 stores (from Amazon to Zazzle!) a percentage of your purchase will automatically be donated to Project Read - at no cost to you (and you may even save money as the toolbar provides coupons and deals as well!). The toolbar also has a search box and each time you search the Internet, about a penny is donated to Project Read!And, please pass this along to all of your friends. The two minutes it takes to add this toolbar to your browser can make a lifetime of difference for our cause!

Understanding the Health Care Law

With the health care reform vote, and its passage occurring this week, I thought it might be useful to post some resources to better understand what the law entails.

The Wall Street Journal has an interactive program showing the key parts of the bill and when they take effect.

How the health care bill could affect you is an interactive from CNN.

‘The Reality of Reform’: Understanding the Health Care Law comes from The New York Times Learning Network. It includes an excellent lesson plan, adaptable for most Project Read students.

Many students will have heard something about Health Care Reform, and I’m just trying to figure it out all myself. I hope you find some of these links to be helpful and please feel free to add to this list in the comments.

-Emily Holmgren, Project Read Program Coordinator

Computer Literacy

-Submitted by tutor Emily Allen

Do phrases like these sound familiar to you?

"I didn't know what that word meant, so I Googled it..."
"Visit us online at..."
"What's your email address?"
"You're only a few clicks away from..."
"Look it up on Wikipedia."
"He friend-ed me on Facebook yesterday..."
"Check out our new blog!"

The computer and the Internet are becoming increasingly important parts of our society. It is amazing to see how literacy skills like reading and writing are being used more and more to connect with people and gain information using computers. How many of us go through a week without checking our emails, visiting a friend's blog, or looking something up with an Internet search engine? With these ideas in mind, it is therefore important that as we help our students gain traditional literacy skills, that we also find ways to help them gain computer literacy. Tutoring activities like email pals, online journals, and online typing programs can help our students learn to function in our virtual world. As Nicholas Negroponte, a computer scientist from MIT, so aptly stated, "Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living."

Here are some great resources that you can use to add some computer literacy skills to your tutoring. Some are targeted for ESL students, but many can be used for all students. Explore! Enjoy!

The Linguistic Funland (http://www.linguistic-funland.com/)

With the catchy slogan “Language is chaos! Language is fun! Language is way cool!,” this website contains various ESL resources mainly directed to teachers, including places to link personal websites, gain information about linguistic departments and various universities, links to online journals, etc.

Stonesoup.com: For young writers and artists (http://www.stonesoup.com/listen)

While this website is not specifically an ESL website, I have used it more than once in my personal ESL tutoring experiences. The website contains stories written and read aloud by children and is primarily for teachers to use to encourage students to do creative writing activities and to showcase student work. This website gave me some great ideas as a tutor about how to encourage writing activities with my ESL student, and the opportunity to listen to young native speakers of the language made for excellent learning opportunities. This website also have links to various childrens’ museums, other resources where young writers are in print, and a link to enable young people to find pen pals, which would make for an excellent learning experience for an ESL student.

Dave’s ESL Café (http://daveseslcafe.com/)

The “One and Only!” Daves’s is a website with resources related to all aspects of teaching ESL. As the site says, “Stuff for teachers…stuff for students…stuff for everyone.” Dave’s ESL Café truly offers a wide variety of resources from job forums to teaching ideas to quizzes on phrasal verbs and everything in between.

About.com: English as a Second Language (http://esl.about.com/)

This website houses links to free online English courses, sign-ups to receive emailed English tips of the day and ideas for lesson plans, as well as vocabulary quizzes, grammar teaching ideas, etc. This site is mainly under the direction of ESL instructor, Kenneth Beare, and his personal ESL blog.

Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page)

Project Gutenberg is a website produced by thousands of volunteers that contains over 30,000 free e-books in online book catalog. With its other partners, affiliates, and resources there are an estimated 100,000 e-books. This website therefore contains a huge collection of free written materials that could be used for all kinds of purposes in ESL classrooms for reading activities, grammar studies, and culture investigations.

The Internet Picture Dictionary (http://www.pdictionary.com/)

This online picture dictionary helps students learn vocabulary by linking the pictures with images. The website is divided into vocabulary lists based on categories like animals, parts of the body, holidays, etc. Various activities are available for students to use to test their knowledge of the vocabulary, including flashcards, fill in the blanks, word scramble, stinky spelling (where they must fix the spelling of the vocabulary words), and straight recall quizzes (where they must type in names of what things are).

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com/)

Randall Davis is a professor from the University of Utah who organized this website as a place for students to work on interactive ESL activities – more than, as he says, “the static page.” The website focuses on helping students develop listening skills. In addition to a variety of listening activities, videos, and recommended textbooks, the site includes links to Dr. Davis’ ESL blog and other websites he has created, including Daily ESL (dailyesl.com), learning slang (ezslang.com), and Train Your Accent (trainyouraccent.com).

Activities for ESL Students (http://a4esl.org/)

This website mostly has interactive activities for students which include grammar quizzes, vocabulary quizzes, crossword puzzles, and “bilingual” quizzes which help students learn new words based on native language vocabulary. Also included on this website are ESL podcasts, and links to YouTube videos for ESL students.

Interesting Things for ESL Students (http://www.manythings.org/)

This site is organized into different areas based on different ESL skills. The sections on vocabulary and grammar include lists with games and puzzles, crossword puzzles, and matching quizzes. In the listening and reading section there are “listen and read along” stories, American stories, and links to ESL videos. The speaking section includes activities related to listening and repeating pronunciation. My favorite part of this website was the Super Quiz Machine, which is an online quiz that, while it can be taken innumerable times, provides student a different set of 20 questions each time they take it from a bank of other 3,000 questions. Other fun activities on the website included spelling quizzes and activities to learn songs, anagrams, proverbs, and slang.

Talking About (http://www.talking-about.net/)

As it advertises, “Learn English online with Talking-About - Your Free Resources to Better English…English Portal enables you to learn English 24 hours a day 7 days a week.” The most compelling feature of this website is that allows students to sign up for a computerized “tutor” to help them by developing lesson plans and tracking their progress in the language. The website is organized into the study of general or business English, and also contains links to other schools and websites for language learning.

Foreign Born (http://www.foreignborn.com/)

“[This website is] your best resource for entering and living in the USA” advertises this site. It contains

guides for all types of topics individuals new to the United Sates would need to know, including sending money abroad, banking, credit cards, insurance, medical care, social security, driving, and information on schools for adults and children. The section “Study in the US” gives info specifically to ESL learners about finding and applying to schools, financing an education, obtaining student visas, information about the TOEFL, etc.

A few other ideas…

LDS Journal (www.ldsjournal.com)

This site allows you to set up a free, private journal which you and your student can write in as often as you would like.

Good Typing (www.goodtyping.com, or www.cursomeca.com for the Spanish version)

This site offers a free program to practice typing skills. You can also access this page in Spanish, which is a great feature.

Gmail (www.gmail.com)

This is a great place to set up a free email account, but also offers a “gchat” program, a fun activity to practice typing back and forth with your student if you are each on a separate computer.

Student Volunteer Opportunities

You don't have to be a tutor to volunteer with Project Read. The following are ways our students can volunteer their time as well:

• Speaking to groups of tutors
• Helping out in the office with office tasks
• Public speaking about Project Read
• Planning activities
• Participating on committees or task forces
• Helping the Program Coordinator raise funds and awareness
• Submitting a guest blog entry

Speak with a Project Read staff member if you have questions about any of these, or if you have other ideas of things you'd like to help out with!

Search the Web, Help the Cause!

We have something new and exciting we'd like to share with you! It's the new Project Read toolbar - once added to IE or Firefox, each time you shop at more than 1,300 stores (from Amazon to Zazzle!) a percentage of your purchase will automatically be donated to Project Read - at no cost to you (and you may even save money as the toolbar provides coupons and deals as well!). The toolbar also has a search box and each time you search theInternet, about a penny is donated to Project Read.

The two minutes it takes to add this toolbar to your browser can make a lifetime of difference! Get the toolbar and please pass it on to your friends!

http://www.goodsearch.com/toolbar/project-read

Book Leveling

Have you ever wondered how you tell at what grade level a book is written? The Gunning-Fog Index is a quick, simple way to pretty accurately determine how hard a text is. This can help tell you whether the materials you are choosing for your student are appropriate for his/her reading abilities. The following are the steps for applying the Index:

Gunning-Fog Index

1. Select a sample

2. Determine the average number of words per sentence

3. Determine the percentage of hard words

4. Add the 2 factors and multiply by 0.4

Note: Do not take samples from the very beginning or end of chapters. Avoid sampling material that is not typical of continuous matter; that is, avoid sampling titles, heading, and vertical lists. Do not sample dialog unless it is typical of the content.

Hard words: A hard word is usually any word of three or more syllables. Count a hard word only once in each sample (if a hard word appears several times, only count the first occurrence). Do not count any three-syllable made up of a two-syllable word and one of the following endings: -s, -es, -‘s, -s’, -ed, -ing, -er, -est, -ly. A hard word does not include acronyms, proper names, numbers, or three-syllable compound words (e.g. anyone, everything, or another).

Sample

In general, construction of pictograms follows the general procedure used in constructing bar charts. But two special rules should be followed. First, all of the picture units used must be of equal size. The comparisons must be made wholly on the basis of the number of illustrations used and never by varying the areas of the individual pictures used. The reason for this rule is obvious. The human eye is grossly inadequate in comparing areas of geometric designs. Second, the pictures or symbols used must appropriately depict the quantity to be illustrated. A comparison of the navies of the world, for example, might make use of miniature ship drawings. Cotton production might be shown by bales of cotton. Obviously, the drawings used must be immediately interpreted by the reader.

Computation

129 words in 10 sentences = asl (average sentence length) of 13 words

26 hard words out of 129 = 20%

Average sentence length 13.0

Percentage of hard words 20.0

Total 33.0

Multiply by 0.4

Grade Level of Readership 13.2

Visit http://www.readabilityformulas.com/gunning-fog-readability-formula.php for more information about the Gunning-Fog Index.

Visit http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php to input text directly into a text box and automatically receive statistics about the text, including the Gunning-Fog level.

Learn About Health Issues With Our New Mini-Lessons

Do you know if you have high blood pressure?
Are you knowledgeable about your family’s health history?
How do you know if it’s safe to take aspirin with your current medications?

Project Read focuses on helping its students achieve the goals that are important to them in their own lives, so we are very excited to introduce Health Literacy “Mini-Lessons.” There are two, topic-specific binders available in our library you may use to incorporate into your tutoring sessions.

Lessons in the “Basic Health Literacy” Binder:

• Health Professionals
  
• Emergency Care
  
• Regular Check-Ups
  
• Health History Forms
• Medicine
  
• Reading Labels & Measuring
  
• Health Insurance

Lessons included in the “Special Topics" Binder:

• Chronic Disease
• Environmental Health
• Male Reproductive Health
• Minority Women’s Health
• Female Reproductive Health
• Prenatal & Maternal Health
  

There are interactive videos and activities at every reading level so each Project Read student can understand how to live healthier. As always, please see the staff if you would like copies made of the lessons.

Job Training Grant Available

Project Read received the following information from UVU:


Do you know someone faced with having to change career paths or upgrade
their job skills to survive? We can help.

UVU Community Education is the recipient of a Federal Community Based
Job Training grant. The purpose of this Federal grant is to increase the
number of trained, certified and skills-ready information workers. It
is directed towards helping lower income, minority, and disadvantaged
populations build job skills.

Individuals who qualify will have the opportunity for computer training
and skill upgrades through a variety of classes such as:

• Community Education computer classes
  
• Medical Coding, Billing and Transcription online training
• Fiber Optics certification
• Ed2Go online classes including: Microsoft Applications, QuickBooks, Digital Photography, and Adobe, and basic computer literacy courses
  

The grant will award up to $500 dollars to low income individuals
seeking computer training. These grant dollars will help prepare them to
enter the workforce with an upgraded skill set for our knowledge-based
economy. Take advantage of this opportunity now! (Must be a U.S.
citizen and 16 years of age or older to qualify. Veterans welcome.)

For more information on this grant opportunity, contact:

Kathy Johnson
Workforce Development Coordinator
Utah Valley University
Phone: (801) 863-8798
Fax: (801) 863-6024
Email: kjohnson@uvu.edu