Literacy Month

Starting each fall, many literacy programs celebrate literacy days and months. UNESCO set September 8 as the International Literacy Day, and programs often host activities throughout the month. This is a good opportunity for your adult learners to tell their success stories.

October is Health Literacy Month and November is Family Literacy Month.

This can be an opportunity for libraries to promote their media, learning software and online health subscriptions. The Florida Electronic Library allows customers to down load articles to their mp3 player and also listen to the audio on their computer. This feature makes the information universally accessible to those who prefer to learn by listening including low level readers.

The Florida Literacy Coalition recently updated the booklet, Getting Started in Adult Literacy. It provides a good overview for those new to all aspects of adult literacy.

Student Persistence

The Florida Department of Education uses federal funds for taskforces who developed a variety of resources for adult education classrooms this year. One of the resources is a student persistence toolkit. Even though it is aimed at school programs, some of the material, concepts and stratagies should work with volunteer literacy programs. Take a look a the resources and let us know what you think would be most useful.

http://mail.live.com/default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

GED and the Role of the Library

Volunteer literacy programs often get learners who are there to, eventually, get their high school diploma. This is happening even more lately as people lose their jobs. Libraries are one of the places people go to get GED books.

This can be an opportuntiy for referrals. Make sure your librarian knows about your program. You may also want to provide them this list of tips that I just posted on ALA Connect . There is a link in my post to GED Fact Sheets which will also be useful for tutors and their learners who are interested in taking the GED.

This ALA Connect, community of interest, is a new site for anyone working on adult literacy in a library or for their literacy partners. You can see posts and can also become a member of the site. It is open to non ALA members and has a Committee on Literacy. (ALA stands for the American Library Association)
Post by Sandy Newell, President of VALF