Fun in February!

Well, we have all been very busy changing CLB levels, filling out logs, doing reports and conference summaries, and if you’ve finished or are near the finish line – bravo! This is a friendly reminder to take some time out during your Zoom classes to have one-on-one conferences with your students. You can do a quick review of their strengths and suggestions for improvement. It’s easy to pull each student aside while students are busy with their groups in the breakout rooms, and a couple of minutes per student are all it takes!

As usual, it’s always helpful to receive links to different websites and resources. So, thank you teachers for sharing great resources with us! 

Suja shared a great reading activity on the State of Emergency in Ontario: 

State of Emergency in Ontario

Shared by Joy:

An excellent resource for teaching your students about digital literacy (password is Diglit4T): Digital Literacy Curriculum Resource | ISSofBC (issbc.org)  

Also, Google has a very good phishing quiz which you may want your students to try: https://phishingquiz.withgoogle.com/?

Some very useful resources From Danielle:

An excellent place to find some pre or post-teaching activities for the presentation on frauds:

 Home (antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca)

Historica Canada has lots of programs, videos, PDFs etc. All very useful for our classes:

PROGRAMS | Historica Canada

 

You can find a  kit designed to help respondents whose mother tongue is not English or French understand and complete the 2021 Census here: 2021 Census Adult Education Kit

Now that the busy “reporting season” is coming to an end, you can enjoy some levity with some fun in February! This month lends itself well to so many great topics– Valentine’s Day, Family Day, Canada Flag Day, and Black History Month just to name a few. Something which all students have great fun talking about is marriage customs from their countries. A great topic to create an assessment in all four skills - you can talk about the customs, food, clothing and so much more! Check out a list of 12 wedding traditions from around the world here: How weddings look different around the world - Insider 

For all the movie buffs here is a list of the top 10 Movies for Valentine’s Day according to IMDb (Internet Movie Database):The 10 Best Valentine's Day Movies Of All Time (According To IMDb) (screenrant.com)

Things will be a little different on Family Day this year with social distancing. So, keep your eye on the community events calendar to know if there are any virtual events for your students to enjoy on Family Day:

Burlington Calendar 

Family Day (oakville.ca) 

Events Calendar - Town of Milton 

Family Day - Halton Hills

Stay warm and safe,

Haleema and Marina

Happy New Year!

Welcome back! Hopefully you had a restful holiday break, took some time for yourself and did a little digital detox. Or at the very least, unplugged for a few days.  Let’s welcome in 2021 even though it’s been off to a bit of a rocky start. Fingers crossed that it’s a major improvement to  2020. 

This year is starting off with some exciting new changes. Carolyn will be taking on the role of Interim Coordinator and we know she’ll be amazing! Also, I’m looking forward to being your PBLA lead.

On January 19th, we’ll be hosting a ‘What the Heck Do I do on Harts Again?’ workshop. We’ll be offering an optional refresher on how to complete progress reports on Harts. For our new instructors, who may not be familiar with Harts, this will be a good opportunity to learn how to complete progress reports on it.  Stay tuned for times and Zoom invites. 

As always, thank you for sharing useful links and resources.

Check out a fun link that Danielle shared: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsxqJMylBN-0x6a-8RT8pAg

Dawn shared a great link to teach Future tenses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LSBme2M4Qo

Your PBLA Leads!