Tutor Victoria Miller passed on some useful links from About.com’s English as a Second Language site with resources to help students start conversations. Below are a selection of links from this great resource.

Top 10 Questions for Starting a Conversation and How to Expand on Them
http://esl.about.com/od/howtogetstarted/a/starting_conversation.htm

Related Lesson Plans:

• Asking Questions
  http://esl.about.com/od/conversationlessonplans/a/ask_low.htm
• Learning Maze Game
  http://esl.about.com/library/lessons/blmazebeginner.htm
• Guilty! – Fun Classroom Conversation Game
  http://esl.about.com/cs/teachingresources/a/bl_guilty.htm

50 of the Most Important Basic English Questions
http://esl.about.com/od/beginnerpronunciation/a/basicquestions.htm

Allan Priaulx, President of LVG’s Board of Directors, will be sending you information about a questionnaire for tutors as part of the development of a strategic plan.  Some of your students will also receive questionnaires.  Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete them.

LVG is a United Way Partner Agency and a ProLiteracy America Program Affiliate.  These organizations, and our funders, want to know that we are providing tutoring which follows the best educational practices and that our students’ literacy skills are improving.  

It is, therefore, important that we document student hours and assess their literacy skills goals and achievements annually.

 LVG uses the ESLOA (English as a Second Language Oral Assessment) when students register for tutoring.  The ESLOA will also be used for annual assessments.  In addition, this year we will pilot a short writing and reading assessment based on the Side by Side curriculum.
 
Based on the schedule that other literacy volunteer groups have found effective, our goal is to begin annual assessments in August and be finished by November 1. 

After student assessments have been completed, we will schedule tutors’ meetings to share information and materials and determine what additional materials tutors would find helpful.  These will be tutors-only sessions and provide opportunities to share your success stories with each other and see what materials LVG has available in addition to the texts.

 Please e-mail Jacqui at info@lvg-ct.org if you have ideas about the best locations and times for tutor gatherings.

Below are a few announcements about new materials and opportunities for you and your students.

Citizenship Classes
We now have three tutors who are interested in and knowledgeable about citizenship. If any of your students are interested in working with a tutor to prepare for their citizenship test, please have them contact us as soon as possible. Our Executive Director, Jacqui Farrell, is setting up class times. If your students are taking a citizenship class through New Milford High School, etc., they are still welcome to join one of our classes for extra, small group help.

Free Tax Prep
There is free income tax preparation assistance available to our students through the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program in Danbury. It is open to anyone on a low or fixed income. Their office is at the Hispanic Center on West Street and their phone number is 203-798-2855.

2010 Census
Census forms are arriving. Ask your students if they need help completing their forms.

A Grant Received for Easy English News
We have received a $500 grant from the Women’s Club of Danbury and New Fairfield for subscriptions to Easy English News. We’re looking into how many subscriptions we will be able to order for that. First come, first served. Contact Jacqui Farrell if your students could benefit.

A comment from one of our tutors that you might find helpful:

At the review session I attended, another tutor noted that she used a bingo game for review of vocabulary. She created her own cards with Excel. I found a site on line that made this process so simple and my students enjoyed bingo as a means of reviewing vocabulary.

http://teachers.teach-nology.com/web_tools/materials/bingo/

Click on the 5×5 card at the bottom of the page. You can type in your vocabulary in the spaces and then click and the words are shuffled for you. This can be repeated, so even if you have many students it will work. How easy is that!

Barbara Leahey

A health related problem can be overwhelming to fluent English speakers. Forms, procedures, directions, dos and don’ts, even basic anatomy can be confusing and even sometimes seemingly contradictory. As we struggle to navigate through the beaucroacy, we forget that we have one advantage over many people facing the same problems – we can speak English.

In a previous post, we linked you to a site devoted specifically to this issue. We’re now going to explore some other sites discussed at a recent workshop.

In this article from the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy you will get the opportunity to follow an ESL tutor, Kate Singleton, in her journey to fill the gap between health related curricula and real life experiences. As a result of her work, you can also find a rich web page full of her health related picture stories that can be used right away in your classes.

Variety is also the spice of life and the following web site gives you that in spades – as long as you are looking to spice up your health literacy curricula. Health Roads Media has lessons in 20 categories including medical tests, dental, nutrition, and staying healthy. The lessons are offered in 5 ways: pictures, sound, written, web page video, and mobile video for the iPod. The materials are also available in an astonishing 20 languages!

If you are looking for brochures, we have the site for you. The 24 Languages Project, a project of the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, has over 200 health education brochures in 24 languages.

Another robust site you can visit is called “Family Health and Literacy” which is described as “a guide to easy-to-read health education materials and web sites for families.” Not only does this site have easy-to-read materials but it also has information on how to get started and links to further curricula. If you like the content on the site, you can order a copy in printed form.

If you have found other great sites on health literacy, please post a comment here and we’ll feature them in an upcoming post.

At a recent workshop in Hartford, one of our tutors (who also happens to be a board member) saw a great presentation from Linda Johnson, a facilitator with the Middletown Adult Ed/ESL program. Part of Linda’s strategy is ‘project-based learning’, real-life, experience-based language. In her presentation she broke this into two categories – social and community. Below is a short list of some great ideas in both of these categories.

Social
Projects include:

• cookbooks
• ‘my story’ books
• painted plates that depict a homeland
• poetry
• flags from many nations
• biographies of famous people who live in student’s native country
• a class newspaper
• a reader’s digest type newsletter that includes jokes, recipes, poetry, how to make things, etc.

Community
Projects include:

• recycling
• service to the community (volunteerism)
• developing a ‘business directory’ of places that students frequent
• a visit to the state capital and meeting state legislators and a tour of the capital bldg
• baby showers
• a blog developed by an esl teacher for student/teacher interaction
• a scavenger hunt around town to discover bldgs, parks, stores, services, etc.
• going to plays at the bushnell and ivoryton theaters
• a breakfast that one class had for other classes and civic groups

There are a number of resources about health safety and disease, but if you want to focus specifically on this season’s H1N1 influenza, there is a government site available at Flu.gov. The site itself is available in multiple languages and also has an entire section of handouts in the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, Espanol, Francais, Deutsch, Italiano, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Flu.gov also has an interactive flu shot locator, an H1N1 Self-Evaluation, and a section on myths and facts.

Local Resources

Connecticut has its own informational flu site at CTFLUWATCH with information in the following languages besides English: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. For information via the telephone, the H1N1 Influenza Hotline is 1-800-830-9426. You can also encourage your students living in CT to dial 211 for information.

Beyond the Flu

Another national site with information on the H1N1 influenza is the Centers for Disease Control  which is available in Spanish and a number of other languages. There is also a Family Health page which deals with a variety of issues beyond the flu, such as safety during holidays like Halloween, and has material written in a style for children.

Using Google News Alerts

To keep up to date on the flu, you can also setup a news alert on Google that can email you a digest of new articles once a day. Simply go the alerts page from Google and fill out the simple form on the right.

Literacy Volunteers on the Green is having a Thanksgiving Fiesta to celebrate our tutors and students and their accomplishments.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Six to Nine P.M.
St. John’s Episcopal Church Hall
7 Whittlesey Avenue
New Milford

See the invitation below. Please print it and share it with your students. It may be useful to use mapquest to print a map for your students.

This will be a casual supper get together where there will be time to get to know other tutors and students. We do hope you will come and encourage your students to come as well.

Please email josephinedill@aol.com with any questions or comments.

Thanksgiving Fiesta Invitation (WORD) (11/2009)

When you submit your hours to us each month, there is a box at the bottom of the page that you can use to tell us about how / what you’re doing in your clasees. One of our tutors shared how he is using brief essays in his.

I have been reading brief essays drawn from books, magazines and newspapers. then, they write answers to 4 or 5 questions about information they received. We review their answers for accuracy, spelling and grammar. Usually, we discuss the article, as well. So, students get listening, writing and conversation skills in one exercise. Recent topics: ethnic food, the way different cultures enhance their bodies (piercing, lip expansion, foot binding,etc.) and polar bears.