Happy November, Literacy Council tutors!

This month you’re getting a dual newsletter for October and November because we’ve been BUSY. Besides an influx of new students (and lots of new tutors- welcome Kaylee, Mike G., Isaac, Wendy, Melisa, Steve, Talitha, and Sarah!), we are also in the process of setting up a new English conversation group at Crossroads Community Center this month (Thursdays at 7:15 p.m.- please let your English students know, as it’s another opportunity to practice), continuing work on our Literacy Council cookbook fundraiser, and making plans for 2026.

Put Wednesday, December 10 at 11 a.m. on your calendar for a Tutor Cookie Party. Bring a cookie to share with your fellow tutors. (Nancy Cross, this is your shining moment!) We will have coffee/ tea/ hot cocoa to sip while you snack and chat. We’d like to also make this a time to collect food for the pantry at Rudolph Girls Books, so if you’d like, please bring in a non-perishable food item to donate, too.

Your fellow tutor, Susan Schubert, wrote a children’s book a few years ago that was quickly picked up for publication by Lantana Global Picture Books in London, England. I’ll Believe You When… Unbelievable Idioms from Around the World was written for kids ages 5-8 and would make a cute holiday gift for your kids or grandkids. “I found that ESOL students became excited when they encountered a different version of their idiom in another student’s culture. English speakers say ‘when pigs fly’, while the Spanish say ‘when frogs grow hair’, and Nigerians say ‘when chickens have teeth’… Students realized that each one of them had a rich mother tongue which often paralleled their classmates but also stood creatively on its own. I began collecting and researching assorted idioms, which then evolved into this children’s picture book,” said Susan about her beautifully illustrated work. Look for it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Walmart online.  

I have a personally much-loved resource for you to check out and download for free if you’re an ESOL tutor or anyone tutoring grammar. You don’t need to know anything about Betty Azar’s famous grammar books to use Fun with Grammar; Communicative Activities for the Azar Grammar Series by Suzanne W. Woodward. It’s a stand-alone book. Each chapter is dedicated to a different aspect of grammar (past/ present/ future tenses, nouns and pronouns, prepositions, adjectives, modals, gerunds and infinitives, comparatives and superlatives… even more advanced topics like passive voice) and is purely an activity book with corresponding, printable worksheets at the end of each chapter. I have used nearly all of the activities at one point or another when I taught ESOL, and it is one of my top five resources, so I can’t recommend it enough. I found that through www.academia.edu, you can download the entire book for FREE.  

I’ll close with the celebratory news that a citizenship student of ours, Erik Solis, passed his test and is now a U.S. citizen. Many thanks to his tutor, Mike O’Connor, for working with Erik and helping him gain the confidence he needed to face all of those questions. If you have any student success stories you’d like to share, please send them to me so I can include them in future newsletters.

Be well, everyone.

~Erin