August 17 through 20

Monday

Monday's spotlight is being shined on the Challenger: Adult Reading Series. I am a huge fan of this series because the materials is broken up into 7 levels, the stories are appropriate for adults, and the work is varied. The stories include fictional and non-fictional reading material. The reading material provided is geared towards English Language Learners and you would notice from reading that each section focuses on a specific reading skill like words with the long "a" sound, words that end with the letter "y," etc. The students actually get a kick out of the patterns in the reading and they tend to laugh at the fact that so many sentences in the story almost sound like they are rhyming. Lastly the questions are like I said varied and ask the readers to think in many different ways in one single activity. Some examples of the variation include answering questions about what is said in the text, placing events in order, unscrambling sentences, and then it asks the readers to consider what they would do in a similar situation.

Tuesday

I have to give a huge shout out to Easter Seal's Asst. Director of Community Employment Services for setting up a fantastic opportunity to go to Peg Perego. Peg Perego  is a company which specializes in children's car seats, strollers, and battery operated toy vehicles. Myself and the C.L.A. teacher were so incredibly pleased with the experience the class had. Our outing consisted of a tour of the warehouse and factory. Our guides were very devoted to making sure we saw everything relevant to the material studied in the C.L.A. portion of the class. Most of the class expressed an interest working for Peg Perego, especially one student who said he couldn't think of a single job he would NOT want to do at the factory.

Wednesday

Wednesday was my favorite day of the week this week! We covered so many topics yesterday that it's hard for me to pick which lesson was my favorite.

One lesson which really went well with the class was a lesson about handling emergencies at work. This lesson came from a curriculum I found online called "Talking Safety." The curriculum is geared towards teenagers who are getting their first jobs, but with some tweaking I have been able to make it appropriate to this class full of adults. In this particular lesson there were two major activities: the first activity was a board game which quizzed the trainees about how to react to situations as well as common safety procedures. The second activity in the lesson provided 9 real stories about different emergencies at work and it asked the trainees to identify what the workers did well in the story and what they did not do well. I broke the activity up into two groups randomly, the first group completed both activities, the second group only completed the board game. Both groups were fully engaged with what they were doing and I was very impressed by each person's knowledge emergency planning and when any questions arose we talked about it as a group.

The second activity we conducted as a class yesterday was how to properly greet strangers. The activity involved a surprisingly large amount of lecturing, however it had several mini breaks which required a lot of interaction with the group. During the activity we demonstrated how to properly greet strangers as well as the wrong ways to greet people. The class really enjoyed acting out the proper manners and they laughed at my examples of "bad behavior." Each person in the class was able to identify at least one of my 8 bad examples of how to greet someone.

Thursday

Today we completed a T.A.B.E. tested! A T.A.B.E test is a regular test administered in adult education to help measure each person's progress in the class. The results are very helpful for helping teachers understand what material students know very well, what material they sort of know, and what students don't appear to know very well.

This test was the class's second time being tested as a whole class. I'm very excited to see each person's results!

After the class spent the whole morning testing we ate lunch and had just enough time in the afternoon to begin a lesson about how to communicate with co-workers. The lesson about communication covered: proper greetings, asking questions, how to politely ask co-workers to be quiet, responding to uncomfortable questions, and how to say "good-bye" at the end of the day. The class only got to asking for help because our conversation went off track to a discussion about proper cell phone use at work, but this wasn't a bad tangent to go off on. As a whole the entire class will need to continue to work on asking questions properly because while each person is aware of proper behavior, they struggle to act it out. I look forward to working on these skills more because I feel very confident that by mastering these skills the trainees will become much more likely to retain a job.