The numbers of disconnected youths (adolescents and young adults aged 16 to 21 who have dropped out of school and who don't have jobs) in adult education programs continue to grow at the Turning Point Educational Center in Brooklyn, New York. These youths can be particularly challenging to teach. They often have negative attitudes toward what they perceive as an educational institution whose purpose is at odds with their everyday experience. The author has found authentic materials to be invaluable when dealing with the challenges presented by an influx of disconnected youth into the programs. Some of these challenges arise from the general developmental stages of teenagers, and some are more particular to the contexts from which the students are coming. Regardless, activities that contextualize education within the lives of the students, while being legitimately academic, engage learners in a way that inauthentic materials cannot. Using authentic materials, the author encouraged learners to see themselves as possessors of vital knowledge, and thus inherently invested in the learning process. This allowed her to facilitate authentic learning experiences that integrated school with learners' everyday lives. In this article, the author describes how she achieved these results using two activities she calls Telling Our Stories and Our Year in Review.