IMPROVING
PRISONER LITERACY AND NUMERACY
It is a sad fact of life that many prisoners are almost illiterate,
although it is usually lack of education rather than lack of
intelligence which is the root cause of their problems. Dyslexia is a
frequent obstacle. For some of the illiterates, obstacles to learning
arise because of anomalies in the phonetics in the English language and
non-phonetic spelling. Progress in numeracy is hindered by the
complication of dealing with parallel metric and Imperial measuring
systems. No doubt in the future spelling reform and discontinuation of
Imperial units will make life easier for students but at the moment
they must cope with the status quo.
There
are syllabuses in
effect for
the various levels of literacy and numeracy of the prisoners but often
the teaching resources are limited. To supplement the available
resources we have prepared some
material which can be accessed through the links below. The material
can be amended if tutors feel the need for it. We are also happy to
prepare presentations on other subjects if required.
The Alfasong
video is aimed at zero-literacy students. It's an aid to matching the
letters in the alphabet to their sounds, including some of the
anomalous sounds.
The Play Your
Cards Right video
starts with the basic 'sounds of letters' and then introduces some
spelling and pronunciation rules. The student is guided
through the lesson by reference to the 'playing card' icons (the
assumption being that most prisoners will be familiar with them!).
Basic
grammar rules are introduced in a separate presentation.
The
links below are for
more
traditional material intended to improve numeracy and related subjects,
presented as simply as possible. They deal with:
dimensions
area
fractions
distance,
speed and time
decimals
subtraction
To
comment on these
ideas or to add suggestions, please contact
us.
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