Overview | More Information – Features | Tutor Training | UN SDG 4  

Free Evaluation Copies – Try before you buy! To help you evaluate whether our approach is a good fit with your needs we have made the following extracts from the Part 1 Handbook and Workbooks available as free PDFs licensed under a permissive Creative Commons CC-BY licence :

Quick Start Guide for Tutors
A set of FAQs to give a quick overview of our work and answer the essential questions that people have about our resources.

Part 1 Handbook Introduction
This contains the introduction to the entire programme provides a good overview of our approach, methods and guiding principles for Adult Literacy Education in the English language. It provides clear guidance on how to use the Lesson Plans together with the learner workbooks,  free learner web app, and the Tutor Hub service. Also includes a complete list of lesson and exercise titles describing the range and coverage of the lessons and exercises. A programme ‘Topic Map’ is also included showing where the key types of skills are developed over the first 30 lessons.

Lesson 1 Plan
Each lesson plan contains step-by-step instructions for the tutor to deliver a face-to-face class using the paper and digital resources for the programme including the simple to use reference system thal links each exercise to a section in the learner workbook. Each plan contains tutor notes providing the background thinking behind the lesson plan, to support the professional development of the tutors.

Lesson 2 Plan
Each lesson plan contains step-by-step instructions for the tutor to deliver a face-t0-face class using the paper and digital resources for the programme including the simple to use reference system thal links each exercise to a section in the learner workbook. Each plan contains tutor notes providing the background thinking behind the lesson plan, to support the professional development of the tutors.

Part 1 Workbook Lesson 1 – 2
This contains the learner resources for the first two lesson in the programme, with easy-to-use references to the lesson plans for the tutors to support learner directions- these can also be used on screen for class work.

 

Buy Handbooks and Workbooks from Amazon or directly from ourselves at 20% discount for 2 or more books sales@citizenliteracy.com. Digital versions of all the Handbooks are available as part of a Tutor Hub subscription, with extra features – for more information please see our Tutor Hub Page. 

 

For Scottish Schools: Please note you can now purchase our printed resources direct from Scotia Books.

Need to use your procurement system? Get in touch and we can help.

Overview

The Tutor Handbooks are suitable for both experienced and new literacy tutors and provide a clear and friendly introduction to the programme, its rationale, and structure and content to rapidly orient tutors to the approach and methods used. Each Handbook covers 10 lessons. There are detailed lesson plans that are broken down into exercises with step-by-step lesson plan activity guides and teaching tips to get tutors up and running quickly. Lesson plans include related Learner App activities to let the tutor easily direct learners to independent learning with the app between ‘classroom’ sessions.

Each Learner Workbook covers a set of 5 lessons with exercise resources that are linked to the lesson plans in the tutor handbooks. The workbooks provide a space for learners to write, collaborate, record, reflect on their work, and for tutors to examine. The workbooks are priced to make them an economic proposition for learning providers. Importantly, the workbooks offer an attractive well produced resource for Learners to work with – this is an important factor for maintaining and building the self-esteem and confidence of learners. 

More Information – Features

Tutor Handbooks: Provide a structured yet flexible educational design that can be delivered as it is or adapted to learners’ needs and community settings (which we encourage). Each lesson is broken down into exercises that are clearly linked with a simple referencing system to a section in a learner workbook, to make it easy for tutors and learners to find the related learning resources, with the relevant Learner App activities identified – to enable learners to practice in between classes. Each lesson usually has a set of tutor notes to provide the background ideas behind each lesson to support tutor development and reflection. Handbooks include a topic map of where the topics appear in the programme to save tutor time in locating the content they need. Also included are concept checking questions to support tutors in class to enable continual learner assessment and progression. Every fifth lesson takes the form of a formative assessment, with full tutor instructions, to help tutors understand the progress that their learners are making and adjust their teaching accordingly. Every fifth lesson in the Learner Web App contains activities that help prepare the learners for each formative assessment with their tutors.

Learner Workbooks: The physical (haptic) act of learning to write letters and words is still an important part of the process of learning to read and write. It helps to encode the understanding of the relations between meaning of the sounds of the language to their written forms, and this is why we also feature handwriting practice and recognition in the learner app. From our own experience of testing our resources with learners we know that possessing their own Workbooks is both convenient and also symbolic – it is appreciated by learners and makes them feel valued. The affective (emotional) aspects of adult literacy tuition are as important as the technical aspects in the acquisition of literacy skills. This helps to build trust between tutor and learners and begins to overcome the previous negative educational experiences that many of our learners carry with them from the past.

Tutor Training

Many of our resources can also be used to support tutor training, there is a general shortage of training resources for tutors to teach adult literacy, especially in the use of phonics. For tutors who are new to adult literacy teaching and the use of structured phonics methods the Handbook and the Learner App provides a useful training and professional development resource.  When combined with our Tutor Hub service, our online free Tutor Resources and the free ‘POST-16 PHONICS APPROACHES: TOOLKIT’, this is a powerful and growing collection of CPD resources. For more information please visit our Resources page.

UN SDG 4

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 4 Quality Education

“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning

opportunities for all.”

The Citizen Literacy programme and its free learner web app is our contribution to meeting this goal and its target of achieving universal literacy