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Dear Members and Friends,
It seems like so much has gone on in the last three months that I don't know where to begin and I will have to leave out many things that I would love to talk about.
Our Summer Get-Together was a wonderful time of sharing experiences and tips. We had two of our tutors address us.
Victor Tiglao, our newly installed newsletter editor, gave an uplifting talk about having been an ESL learner himself.
Sue Gannon has been a career counselor and is offering to be a resource to help our tutors/students who need job counseling.
If you are
interested in a group session
for tutors whose ESL students need help with the aspects of job search please let us know at
[email protected]
or leave a message on our phone line 925-685-3881.
DVLC held a number of drop-in group tutoring sessions during the summer. Some were in the evening at the Good Shepherd Church and some were during the day at the Walnut Creek library. Attendance was low with tutors sometimes outnumbering the learners. At this time we have no future group ESL sessions planned. However if there is somebody who would passionately like to organize future sessions we can certainly help to make it happen.
Our Hours Coordinator, Rachel Sanborn, is proposing a fresh option for tutors and students who are already paired. See the item in this newsletter about Tutor/Student Social Dining.
Our fall tutor training workshop went off very smoothly thanks to the combined efforts of the entire Board and an enthusiastic group of 25 new tutors. Our band of ESL volunteer tutors now numbers 110! Tutors who just completed the workshop are invited to a Followup meeting on November 11 at 10:00 in the morning.
Denise Coyne and I attended the bi-annual ProLiteracy Conference in Minnesota this year and learned about so many resources for ESL tutors that conveying the exciting information to the rest of our organization is a daunting task. In the coming months our
www.dvlc4esl.org
website will have a new link called Resources where we can share a directory to point out items of interest: apps your students may use, a gold-mine of tutor information on the Minnesota web-site, ProLiteracy's Education Network, lesson planning/lesson plans, and more.
At the Conference we met centenarian Ruth Colvin, founder of Literacy Volunteers of America which she started in 1962. Literacy Volunteers of America merged with Laubach Literacy in 2002 to become ProLiteracy, an international organization. To listen to a lady who has passed her 100th birthday and still works out for 20 minutes each morning, plays golf three times a week, and is writing her 7th book is nothing if not awe-inspiring.
l. to r. Ruth Colvin, Lucy, Denine Torr - ProLiteracy Board Chair
I hope to see many of you with your students at our next major gathering, the Holiday Potluck on December 2 at noon.
Lucy Goodell
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