IN THIS ISSUE: Amy's Ramblings Letters to the Editor ESL Updates Tip of the Month Volunteer Spotlight September's Vignette Giving Thanks Bits and Pieces Hogar Staff: John Odenwelder Program Director jodenwelder@ccda.net Education Services: Amy White Group Manager awhite@ccda.net, x235 Cindy Brown Manager cbrown@ccda.net, x250 Diana Gibson Manager dgibson@ccda.net, x239 Erin Maradiegue Manager emaradiegue@ccda.net, x251 Kristen Gasimov Manager kgasimov@ccda.net, x249 Sheila Sullivan Manager ssullivan@ccda.net, x238 Phil Spencer Manager pspencer@ccda.net, x243 Legal Services: Michelle Sardone Group Manager msardone@ccda.net Dan Macguire Staff Attorney dmacguire@ccda.net Enrique Vargas Paralegal evargas@ccda.net Nancy Carbajal Receptionist ncarbajal@ccda.net Ximena Caceres Paralegal xcaceres@ccda.net Social Services Department: Dawn Dumas Manager ddumas@ccda.net, 703-443-2481 Hogar Immigrant Services 6201 Leesburg Pike Suite 307 Falls Church, VA 22044 (T) 703-534-9805 (F) 703-534-9809 http://www.ccda.net/ If you would like to have this newsletter sent to a different e-mail address or if you would like to unsubscribe from the mailing list, please e-mail emaradiegue@ccda.net.

Amy's Ramblings Saludos a todos! (English Only!!) Oops! Greetings! I know that each issue of E-news is better than the last but oh boy – are you in for a treat today! At the end of last month, our summer intern from Georgetown University, Alfredo Fletes, organized an incredible event that combined soccer, food, and games for the whole family! When he entered our program, he was charged with the task of coming up with new ways to conduct outreach to students. We were so pleased with the result! Check out the pictures below of children taking a soccer clinic and the kids having a blast with Hogar staff and volunteers! It was the First Annual Family Soccer Day and we hope it will not be the last. Hogar is pleased to announce its Fall Training Series. There is truly something in here for everyone! Please plan on attending at least one; you AND your students will benefit greatly from your newly learned knowledge. Also, we’d like to welcome guest presenters Rena Baker, Bill Chambers, and Connie Holtz to our line-up this fall. Want a little extra help on top of the trainings? Be sure to check out each month’s teaching tip – this month’s will help you breathe fresh air into your warm-ups! In this issue, you can find out how to learn more about the Catholic stance on immigration. Speakers from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and from Catholic Charities will speak during the “Justice for Immigrant Series.” Please see below for dates and location. Thank you to everyone who volunteered at fall registrations and our Naturalization workshop! We sincerely appreciate your efforts and couldn’t do it without you. Abrazos, Amy White Group Manager, Education Services Letters to the Editor The largest workplace immigration raid in US history occurred August 25, 2008 in Laurel, Mississippi. About 585 foreign-born workers faced possible deportation when they were rounded up by federal agents at a Howard Industries transformer factory. For those of us at Hogar Immigrant Services and Catholic Charities, what may be most troubling about this even is that, according to an Associated Press report, fellow factory workers openly applauded as immigrants in their midst were taken into custody. What does this applause by American co-workers tell us about American life in 2009? Is our society becoming less welcoming, despite all our efforts? The next day, about half of the local school district’s 160 Hispanic children were absent. Parents were afraid immigration officials would seize their sons and daughters, according to Roberto Velez, pastor of a Laurel-area Christian congregation, the AP report said. Yes, that was a small town in southern Mississippi, but can we afford to assume such a reaction could not take place in the Diocese of Arlington? -A. Marty Willis The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of Hogar Immigrant Services or official policies of Hogar Immigrant Services. To send a letter, email emaradiegue@ccda.net with your first and last name. ESL Updates Fall 2008 Teacher Training Series! The Education Department is excited to unveil its training series for the new semester! We have some brand new trainings, as well as some old favorites that are sure to inspire your lessons! Be sure to sign up soon, as spaces are limited. To sign up for any of the following trainings, please contact Erin Maradiegue at emaradiegue@ccda.net. In your email please include your full name, phone number, the name of the training you would like to attend, teaching site (or organization name if you are not a volunteer with Hogar Immigrant Services). Trainings are $15/person for non-Hogar volunteers. Attendance at a training will count towards your 4 hour per year training requirement. We look forward to seeing you there! Who's Speaking in Your Classroom--Students or Teacher? Trainer: Rena Baker Saturday, October 4, 2008 9:00 am - 12:00 pm St. Mark Christian Formation Center, Room 219 9972 Vale Road Vienna, VA 22181 This workshop is an introduction to ESL teaching, designed to help you Increase your students' comprehension and provide lots of speaking practice by presenting new vocabulary and dialogues more effectively. The morning will include a sensitivity lesson in a foreign language; opportunities for hands-on practice; tips and techniques helpful at all levels; and time to discuss your teaching questions and problems. Appropriate for beginning teachers and those wanting a boost in their teaching. Presenter Rena Baker has wide experience teaching in Fairfax County Public Schools Adult ESOL Program and training volunteer ESL tutors for the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia. To register for Who's Speaking in Your Classroom--Students or Teacher? please contact Ida Hiller at (703) 281-9209 or inh@ix.netcom.com. Grammar Rodeo Trainers: Diana Gibson and Cindy Brown Saturday, October 11, 1:00 – 3:00 pm Hogar Immigrant Services Office, Falls Church 6201 Leesburg Pike, Suite 307 Falls Church, VA 22044 Howdy pardner! Do you find verb tenses as confusing as your students do? This is an opportunity for intermediate and advanced teachers to brush up on pesky grammar and discuss strategies for teaching it. Let’s grab the bull by the horns and lasso ourselves some conditional statements. Yeehaw! Free t-shirt to participants who appear in cowboy/girl garb. Using Music In and Out of the Classroom Trainers: Bill Chambers, Fairfax County Public Schools Saturday, October 18, 1:00 – 3:00 pm Hogar Immigrant Services Office, Falls Church 6201 Leesburg Pike, Suite 307 Falls Church, VA 22044 Whether or not you are musically inclined, everyone loves music. Music is fun, relaxing, energizing and a great tool for bringing people together. In this session, the presenter will provide practical tips and ideas for using music in the classroom as a means of building community. Handouts will be provided. Immersion Works! Trainers: Kristen Gasimov and Sheila Sullivan Saturday, October 25, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Hogar Immigrant Services Office, Falls Church 6201 Leesburg Pike, Suite 307 Falls Church, VA 22044 “I don’t speak Spanish. Are my students really going to understand me if I just speak English?” ESL teachers often have this dilemma. Many who don’t know Spanish are skeptical that they can be successful ESL teachers. This training will show participants that it is possible to teach students (even beginners) using only English in the classroom. A lesson will be given completely in Azeri, demonstrating how using body language, realia, and repetition eliminate the need to speak the native language in class. Great Games and Awesome Activities Trainers: Sheila Sullivan and Amy White Monday, October 27, 2008, 7:00 – 9:00 pm St. Joseph’s Catholic Church 750 Peachtree Street Herndon, VA 20170 We’ve taken our classic “Games, Games, Games” training, tossed in a couple of our “Low-Prep Activities”, and mixed in a pinch of new theatre-style activities. The result is a slew of activities that will help your students build oral confidence and communication skills. Games and cooperative activities go a long way towards building a community in your classroom. Not only that, they keep your students motivated and coming back for more! Motivation and Goal Setting Trainers: Erin Maradiegue and Phil Spencer Saturday, November 8, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Hogar Immigrant Services Office, Falls Church 6201 Leesburg Pike, Suite 307 Falls Church, VA 22044 Our students have busy lives-work, family, and the trials of a new country are in constant competition for their attention. So how do you keep the majority of your students coming back class after class? Discover ways to motivate your students to return every week by discussing their goals for learning English and incorporating them into your lesson plans. Creating a Community in the Classroom Trainer: Connie Holtz Saturday, November 15, 10:00 am- 12:00 pm Hogar Immigrant Services Office, Falls Church 6201 Leesburg Pike, Suite 307 Falls Church, VA 22044 Create a community within your classroom by teaching in a non-traditional, student-centered environment that makes students feel “safe” and leads to more peer-to-peer interaction. Building community in our ESOL classrooms helps learners feel more comfortable with each other, aids in retention and makes a teacher's life easier. So how do we do build community with all the diversity in our ESOL classes? What works at different levels for different cultural groups? Find out from ESOL veteran Connie Holtz. Connie has been teaching with Hogar for over 5 years and has developed some wonderful techniques to build a strong sense of unity in the classroom. Wreading and Riting! Trainers: Cindy Brown and Diana Gibson Saturday, November 22 Location and Time TBD Many students do not like to do reading activities in class because it takes time away from speaking. However, a job application, a short article, song lyrics, a passage from a novel, an advertisement – all these are great ways to practice reading and writing skills while introducing new topics for discussion and study. We will present helpful tips to incorporate reading and writing into your lesson in a way that students can enjoy. Tip of the Month Making Your Warm-Up Work for Your Students The warm-up you choose to begin your lesson serves several functions, and plays a critical role in the success of your class. It can be used to get to know your students better, and to put them at ease, lowering their affective filters. It can get students up and moving, waking them up after a long day at work. It can also be used as a comprehension-check or evaluative tool, and it can be a wonderful way to recharge and reconnect with students before we plunge into the “nitty gritty” of our lessons. Sometimes we can slip into the habit of using the warm-up as a time-killer as our less-than-punctual students trickle into class. If we consider the warm-up as simply “filler” time and don’t put much thought into it, we are missing out on a wonderful opportunity to have students learn and review in an informal and open setting. However, if we think about the warm-up as a subtle and fun introduction to the day’s class, students can be better prepared and more receptive during formal presentation time. Try including in the warm-up the grammar structure and/or vocabulary your students will be learning that day. That way, they can “sneakily” use the grammar before they are “officially” taught it. Many students pick up more language than you think outside the classroom, and preemptively incorporating it into your warm-up is a good way to check to see what they already know. By “previewing” the day’s grammar, you can gauge the class’s readiness to move ahead, or perhaps find out that you need to spend extra time explaining the grammar point. To give you a few examples of how to do this, here are a couple of icebreakers/warm-ups (that can also be used as games later on in class), and how to modify them to different levels and/or grammar points: Dice Game Use a regular die or a large homemade one (use cardboard or foam board) and have each student roll. The teacher should have a list of six questions that correspond with the numbers on the die, and asks the question for the number rolled. Examples (Intermediate): What did you do yesterday? What is your best friend like? What is something that makes you happy? Where would you like to go on vacation and why? What do you like to do on the weekends? What is your favorite kind of music and why? Modification: Beginner Level: Write the questions on the board or pass them out on half-slips of paper so that students can see and hear each question as you ask Use simple, general review questions like, “What is your name?” and “Where are you from?” Ask specific vocabulary set questions like “What color is your shirt?” and “What color is the table?” Specific Grammar Tense—Make all the questions in the same grammar tense to review or preview: simple past—“What did you do last night?” present perfect—“Have you been to Washington DC?” simple future—“Are you going to see a movie this weekend?” Coffee Pot Have one student think of a verb that has been reviewed in class without telling anyone what it is. Students guess the verb by replacing it with the word, “coffee pot,” and forming questions with yes/no answers. Examples: Are you coffee potting right now? Do you coffee pot every day? Do you need any special equipment to coffee pot? Modification: Remind students to use specific verb tenses from the lesson, like: Simple past: Did you coffee pot yesterday? Present perfect continuous: Have you been coffee potting a lot lately? By putting a little thought into closely coordinating your warm-up with your lesson, your students will benefit. They will be ready for the lesson, feel confident in their review of past material, and interested from their preview of new material. Students will also feel good about starting every class with activities that are participatory and FUN! Volunteer Spotlight Hogar Immigrant Services would like to say a special thanks to all the volunteers who lent a hand at Hogar's inaugural Family Soccer Day! The day included a soccer clinic for children ages 5 - 14 led by members of the American Soccer League and Hogar staff, an exhibition soccer game by two teams from the American Soccer League, food from Cici's Pizza and Rosita's Family Restaurant, and family-friendly games run by some wonderful volunteers!! Generous contributions from Kihomac Inc., Loudoun Electric, The Corp, Fedex Kinkos, Volunteer Fairfax, and Barnes and Noble helped make the day possible. September's Vignette Early on the morning of August 13, 2008 immigration officials checked the identities of workers entering through an employee entrance of the Dulles International Airport. Forty two people were detained, alleged of being in the country without proper documentation. On August 27, I received an email from one of our community partners, it read, “...is there anything you can do to help some families of the people who were detained in the Dulles raids? They could use food, monetary assistance, etc. Please let me know [as soon as possible] and I will send them to you.” I found myself typing, “Sure, send them over”. Forty-five minutes later, three very courageous yet struggling women walked through the door of the Western Regional Office in Leesburg. They brought with them six young children. Gladys, Laura, and Patricia each had their own stories.* Each came from a different country and had a different set of needs. However, they were brought together by one common situation, the absences of their husbands after the Dulles raids. Our volunteers immediately went to work, attending to the children, opening up juice boxes and pulling out puzzles and games. I sat down with each of the mothers to listen to their needs. Interestingly enough, they didn’t ask me for money. They weren’t looking for me to pay their bills. Each woman asked for advice for their specific circumstance. All three women had lost their family’s primary bread winner on the day of the raid and they understood that they needed to sustain themselves and their children. Gladys has a large mortgage and is concerned about how she will be able to stay in good standing with the bank without a larger income. She is currently working full-time and was looking for a second job to supplement her income, due to the absence of her husband. Because she has all proper documentation, we immediately sent her over to the Loudoun Workforce Resource Center, the county's job assistance center. Laura and Patricia rent apartments and wanted guidance as to what they should do in order to remain at their homes and pay their rent in a timely manner. They all had difficult questions that were hard to answer. In all my research, I have yet to find a solution for a family that owns their own home, pays their taxes, and loses the head of their household to deportation. Currently, we continue to work with these families and others that have come to us since the raid. I am working with some on food assistance and others with childcare so that they can work a second job to make ends meet. We have received donations from St. Francis de Sales to help one of the women with pampers for her infant and non-perishable food for the family. Perhaps our office is truly showing these ladies, in some small way, the helping hand of God. For more information on how you can assist these women and young children, please contact Dawn Dumas at ddumas@ccda.net or call 703-443-2481. *Names were changed in order to protect the privacy of our clients. Bits and Pieces Discover VOICE in NOVA Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement in NOVA (V.O.I.C.E. in NOVA) is holding its first meeting October 5, 2008, 4:30 - 7:00 pm at First Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Dumfries (16622 Dumfries Rd (VA. 234), Dumfries, VA 22025-1920). VOICE in NOVA is a partnership between Northern Virginia Clergy and lay leaders, along with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Over the last three years they have worked to create a broad-based, non-partisan, multi-racial, multi-faith, citizens’ power organization, rooted in local congregations and other voluntary associations to make change on social justice issues (affordable housing, immigration, child care, etc.) affecting the lives of low- and middle income residents in 4 Northern Virginia jurisdictions: Prince William, Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria. IAF has several organizations in the Washington/Baltimore Metro. Area: Washington Interfaith Network (DC), Action In Montgomery (MD), Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development, People Acting Together in Howard (MD). These organizations passed the first living wage law in the United States (Baltimore), won a $25 million dedicated annual fund for affordable housing in Montgomery County, MD, and secured $1 billion for neighborhood investment in Washington, DC. These organizations have also trained thousands of leaders for public action at the local, state, and national level. Founded in the 1940’s by Saul Alinsky, IAF is the country’s oldest and largest organizing network. Today, IAF has affiliates in sixty cities/counties in the US, England, Canada, and Germany. For more information on the IAF, visit www.industrialareasfoundation.org http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org/. All clergy and lay leaders from VOICE Sponsoring Institutions as well as, leaders from new institutions interested in learning more about VOICE are encouraged to attend. _____________________________ Learn More About The Catholic Stance On Immigration This fall speakers from U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and from Catholic Charities will speak at the “Justice for Immigrants” series, sponsored by St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington, and Church of the Nativity. Each seminar will address a different aspect of immigration from a Catholic perspective. The schedule is as follows: September 25: "What Our Faith Says about Immigrants and Immigration" by Chris West, the Catholic Relief Services Director of Field Operations for the Justice for Immigrants Campaign for the USCCB. October 9: “Immigration: The myth, the facts, and the history” by Tony Cube, National Campaign Manager for the Justics for Immigrants Campaign, USCCB and immigrants who will tell their own stories. October 23: “Challenges Created by Immigration Issues” by John Odenwelder, Program Director for Hogar Immigrant Services, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington (CCDA) and Michelle Sardone, Group Manager, Legal Services for Hogar Immigrant Services, CCDA. The series will be held at St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church (5222 Sideburn Road, Fairfax, VA) from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. All are welcome. _____________________________ Local Teacher Training Opportunity offered by the Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center The VALRC is holding a Goal Setting Workshop for teachers Friday, October 10, 9:30 am – 2:30 pm at the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia's office (2855 Annandale Rd., Falls Church, VA 22042). Lunch will be provided. To register go to http://valrc.org/webcal/?p=116. Setting clearly defined and meaningful goals and monitoring progress toward goal achievement are two of the most powerful factors influencing retention and persistence in adult students. With persistence, comes success. In this workshop, participants will explore values and perceptions effecting goal-setting, ways to set meaningful short-term and long-term goals, monitoring progress, and the influence of assessment and NRS reporting on goal-setting.