Happy Friday everyone! Here at Literacy Connexus we hope that you are all having a great week. I’d like to end the week by featuring one of Coffee Connexus’ most recent presenters, Melanie Garcia.
Some of you may remember a recent post I made about Coffee Connexus (this one). If you missed it, Coffee Connexus is a sort of forum held by Literacy Connexus via Zoom on the first Friday of every month. It’s a place for ESL educators, and those who are a part of ESL ministries and organizations, to be able to collaborate virtually. Each Coffee Connexus session includes a short check in and participant discussion, two 30 minute presentations for participants to choose from, and a wrap up that involves the chance to win two Amazon gift cards (for guilt free book buying of course!). The presentations given during Coffee Connexus sessions are done by educators who volunteer to share their own information, opinions, resources, and more with their peers.
One of this month’s Coffee Connexus presentations was done by Melanie Garcia, a teacher on special assignment with the Community Education Center’s department at Socorro Independent School District. I personally got to sit in on her session and I found it so helpful that I had to share it with everyone. I also thought this would be a great way to show readers an example of what they could see if they decided to join us for Coffee Connexus.
Melanie shared how she takes news articles from Breaking News English, and turns it into a week’s worth of activities fit for intermediate ESL students. Many times, it can be hard to find the balance between not moving too quickly and having your students not retain enough from the lesson, and not moving too slowly and having your students get bored. But, Melanie’s presentation showed how even just a single news article can become many different activities. This is great for those of us with multilevel classrooms, where some of our students may need a little more time with the material but we also have to keep the attention of our more advanced students, because the variation in activities was great enough to still feel new and interesting, but the topic was familiar throughout all they different activities.
Check out her slides here to see what I mean, and maybe even get some activity ideas for your own lessons. Hopefully you’ll decide to join us next month for May’s Coffee Connexus and you’ll get the chance to learn from other educators and connect with us (see what I did there?).
Our other Coffee Connexus featured presenter for April, was Mark Heaver from the Texas Baptists organization, who gave our participants a little more insight into the upcoming Response to Refugees symposium coming up (quickly!) on May 1, 2021.
Stay tuned to learn more about the symposium and how you can participate, or send us an email here. Subscribe to the blog or our newsletter, and follow us on Facebook for easy updates on events and future Coffee Connexus dates. As always, happy teaching!