Adult Learning Support will be closed for the holiday period from the 21st of December. We will reopen on the 16th of Janurary.
We'd like to wish all our staff, learners, tutors, volunteers, governance and the agencies that we work with a Merry Christmas and a great holiday season. We look forward to seeing you again in the new year.
Adult Learning support has received a funding grant from AKO Aotearoa to produce a template resource that helps learners read. We will be taking stories from our "Books for Blokes" series and turning them into a video with the words on screen, audio narration and reading aid in the form of line indicators and "hoops" like slurs in music notation that group words together and help the learner to read in chunks.
Once we have deigned the template for the stories and tested it, we will be releasing the template under creative commons licence so that others can build on what we have done and adapt it to their own purposes.
We look forward to sharing the results with you. We would like to thank David Whitehead from the University of Waikato and also Jan Blythe and Caroline Budge for their contributions.
The July Newsletter is now available for download. We welcome our new tutors and a new committee member. It also covers programme news, our collaboration with Whenua Iti and some freebies.
Older copies of the newsletter can be downloaded here
A 15 year old boy who has worked his way in and out of various schools in the region came to ALS through the NZ Correspondence School support teacher. At first he was very unsettled and his attendance was irregular. He found the course content irrelevant and boring. We discussed this with the support teacher and new, more interesting booklets have been started. Another issue has been his constant use of a cell phone resulting poor concentration.
We began setting the alarm for 10 minutes work, then a few minutes to clear texts and then back to work for another 10 minutes. He’s managing 30 minutes of work now and arrives ready to get stuck in. One of his English books requires using an MP3 player which is fun and he enjoys working on his spelling with the ‘Nessy’ computer programme. This plus the Lexia Cross Trainer programme provide a varied morning for him.
The March newsletter is out, grab a copy, have a read. It covers our recent PD day (see pictures here), the TEC assessment tool and a day in the life of our resident tutors.
Carol heard about ALS through a local support agency. She is in her mid fifties and has always struggled with reading and writing and feels extremely self-conscious about this. Even looking at certain words can almost create a panic attack as they remind her of awful school experiences. But Carol reached a point where she became fed up with her literacy fears and with an equal measure of trepidation and determination she arrived at the door of ALS!
Words haven’t made sense to her. She has not had phonic awareness or an understanding of the patterns within words. Decoding was a complete mystery and how a word is spelt does not match what she hears. Along with this, Carol needed a major boost in confidence. Three weeks down the track, Carol has made real progress. She has moved through the first 2 levels of the Lexia Foundation Reading computer programme and she’s learned 2 strategies for spelling – Carol then taught one of these to her grandson with great success! She has learned to use the computer and mouse for the first time. This is the first time in her life she has been excited about learning.
The parenting and life skills course which ran last year, has whet two of the mum’s appetite for learning; they’re back for more! One to start NCEA Level 1 and one to start Level 2.
We have allocated all day Tuesday and Thursday mornings for NCEA learners; this way, they can support and learn from each other in addition to input from tutors. If you have any students contemplating doing NCEA, you’re welcome to come in for a chat and have a look at some of the workbooks to give you and your student an idea of what’s involved.
We ask our learners to trust us, we ask them to challenge themselves and step out of their comfort zone, so we thought we should do the same. Whenua Iti Outdoors in Lower Moutere, hosted our first professional development day for 2011. We took on a set of physical and mental challenges. At the end of the day, the ulitmate challenge was to climb up to and negotiate the high wire course, 10 metres off the ground. Read on to see more photos.
Where you can't read to your children, enjoy a good book, complete a qualification or fill out reports for your employer. Having poor reading, writing or numeracy skills is not only embrassing, it limits your life choices.
Adult Learning Support is running a tutor training course for the Certificate in Adult Literacy Tutoring (level 5). This course is NZQA approved and can lead to a national certificate. There is no cost to you for the training. Tutoring is engaging, worthwhile, challenging and often fun.
We hope everyone had a great holiday full of over-eating, relaxing and general indulgence. We've taken down the Christmas decorations, pinned up the new calendar, caught up with all those outstanding jobs like fixing the laminator, and we're open for business. Just as well, as the first new students for the year have started and Susan is busy with more assessments. It promises to be a busy year.