Holiday Issue 2008
Holiday Issue 2008
Inside
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As you no doubt already know, Literacy Volunteers of Greater Augusta has already settled into its spacious new office on Spruce Street in Augusta. What a delight to work in this light and airy space and to be able to provide such a pleasant place for volunteers and students to meet. And plenty of handy free parking! With several rooms for tutors and students to work in and a great open area for trainings and meetings, the move is working out to be a good one for all of us.
LVA’s annual meeting was held a month later than usual on November 6th, giving the staff a chance to settle in. Positive feedback was provided by those who attended.
A special thank you goes to John Brandt, LVA’s web master who dropped in to check us out and take some pictures to post on the site. We are also grateful to Sharon Brunette for providing the lovely platter of treats.
LVA is happy to recognize the following members for their outstanding achievements:
We also want to acknowledge the dedicated work of Marsha Cottrell and Jack Nicholas who are stepping down from the board this year. We appreciate all of their support and hard work and we will greatly miss them both.
At our annual LVA board retreat in August, members discussed several ways to place more emphasis on student recruitment and community outreach this year. As a result of that discussion, the board recently hosted two focus groups in an effort to get some constructive feedback and ideas on improving our program and on increasing the number of adult learners.
The first meeting was held at Slate’s Restaurant in Hallowell and included members of the media. We are looking forward to partnering with Blueberry Communications (formerly Clear Channel) to help us increase awareness about adult literacy and hopefully, reach more potential students.
The second meeting was held at our new office on Spruce Street and included human resource personnel from the City of Augusta, Pine State Trading, PFG North Center, DHHS and Maine State Housing. This group offered many wonderful suggestions and we look forward to partnering with them also.
Special thanks to our facilitators for these groups, Judy Paradis and Jack Nicholas and especially to all participants. We appreciate your time with LVA!
Image from Creative Commons - by Becstar
The fall basic reading workshop was held on Tuesday evenings in October at the new LVA office on Spruce Street in Augusta. The sessions were led by Bob McIntire and Jenny Small.
I am pleased to announce we have six more wonderful tutors who have joined the Literacy Volunteers family.
They are Dawn Stiles, Heidi Conover, Robin Pirruccello and Patty Ngara all of Augusta and Amy Veilleux of Winslow. Elizabeth Cooper of Augusta also joins the group after completed her tutor training with the Farmington Affiliate.
Congratulations to all our new tutors for doing an outstanding job in the workshop and we wish them well as they begin their adventure as literacy tutors.
Twelve tutors from the Augusta, Waterville and Farmington areas participated in an ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) training on November 8 at our Augusta office. Phyllis de Fano, executive director of LV-Portland, shared her extensive knowledge of ESOL gained from over 15 years experience in teaching ESOL learners in both New York, as an ESOL Program Coordinator and here in Maine through Literacy Volunteers. Phyllis offered inspiration and insight in dealing with many of the special issues involved in working with our ESOL learners. Tutors also had an opportunity to try many activities especially designed for their students and came away with many, many terrific new resources. Our sincere thanks to Phyllis for a very interesting and fun day!
Tutors who were unable to attend the workshop – please note that we have much information from the workshop in our library as well as many new books for our ESOL learners. Please stop in and browse a bit!
More about International Literacy Day
Our new office is light and welcoming and best of all, we have a terrific space for our library!
Books are all organized according to various teaching topics such as:
We also have a nice selection of fiction and non-fiction books for adult learners, large print magazines and dictionaries, books on tape (we even have tape recorders!), newspapers, and plenty of great games to assist in your tutoring.Gail is in the office Monday through Thursday, 9am-2pm and would love to have you drop by to visit. If those times do not fit your schedule, please call the office to arrange another mutually convenient time – we can certainly accommodate!
Also, be sure to check out “Thinkfinity”, sponsored by the Verizon Foundation, which provides free lesson plans and some wonderful online resources for adult literacy. The content is all provided by ProLiteracy and well worth looking at!
Save the DateLiteracy Volunteers of Greater Augusta
presents
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Seasons Greetings to our Valued SupportersLiteracy Volunteers of Greater Augusta wishes all of you, Students, Tutors, Board and Training Members and our wonderful Funders a most Joyous Holiday Season. Thank you, to each one of you, for your contributions toward increasing literacy skills in our little corner of the world.
