Greetings, Team In-home Tutoring!

It's time to report your tutoring activity for November.

Click here to go to the reporting link. As always, the unmasked link will be at the end of this message.

Newsy things

The holidays are upon us! Don't worry if you have to miss some tutoring sessions because you're traveling or spending time with family. It's fine. Just make sure your student knows what's going on.

I often get asked if it's OK to give holiday gifts to your student and family if they don't celebrate Christmas. Yes, it's OK. what I used to tell my students that it was part of my culture to share and give gifts for Christmas. Recipients don't have to observe Christmas to be included in that part of our cultural traditions.

The resettlement agencies usually host gift giveaways for their refugee clients, and those are by invitation.

New Year celebrations

Just like with Fourth of July, it's a good idea to remind your students that some people like to set off fireworks and firecrackers to celebrate the New Year holiday. The sounds can be upsetting to people who have lived in a war zone, but if they know to expect it, then that mitigates some of the anxiety.

Snow

Make sure your students know how to find out if their children's schools are closed for bad weather. It's also a good idea to go over the finer points of dressing for the weather. Afghans are fine--they come from a climate and geography that is almost identical to Colorado's, but folks from other places, especially Africa, might not yet have an appreciation for how easy it is to get frostbite. It's also worth talking about how to correctly walk in slippery conditions (look to penguins for a good example!). There are lots of great YouTube videos on this topic, and lovely public radio story, here.

Have a conversation

In case you missed it earlier, we have an online discussion forum/community. Well, that was the intent when it got set up, but so far, I think there are only five members (including me). This is a wonderful resource and a way for all of you to connect with each other. Here is a refresher of the information I sent out last month:

Our online discussion forum is open for conversations. You will need to log in whenever you want to post to a discussion or just read what everyone else is talking about.

1. Go to the website: https://moodle.emilygriffith.edu
   
2. Click on the gray "All other users" login button on the right side of the screen (under the green staff and students login button).
   
3. Your user name is your firstinitiallastname, all lowercase, and no spaces or hyphens. For example, Ferris Bueller would be fbueller. The system should recognize you from the list I used to enroll you into the discussion forum "class."
   
   
4. Your initial password is  07/04/2019, including the forward slashes.
   
   
5. You will be asked to (forced to) change your password when you first log in. The password requirements are listed directly above the fields for changing the password. Pay attention--this is a challenging set of criteria.
   
6. When you successfully change your password, you will go to the main page where you will see the In-Home Tutor Community Forum course site listed. You will need to click into the course site and the discussion forum is what comes up first.
   
7. Choose a topic by clicking on "Discuss this topic" under its description.
   
8. A Helpful Hint: I figured this out by accident. Once you open a topic, look at the area above the Social forum heading. you'll see a string showing where you are. Click on "social forum" in that location string, and all of the topics will show up on the screen. It's much easier to navigate this way.
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If you have any trouble logging in or getting back in once you've set up your account, send an email to Tim at INTEL@emilygriffith.edu.

Please introduce yourself in the introductions topic area of the forum!

Note that you can "subscribe" to a topic, which means you will get an email every time someone posts in that discussion. That can get annoying. I believe there's a digest function that lets you get periodic updates, or you can not subscribe at all, skip the notifications, and just log in whenever it occurs to you to see if anyone has posted.

Our forums are closed format, meaning that they can't be seen or previewed by anyone outside of our group. They won't even come up in a Google search.

That's all from me for this month.

Stay warm, drive safely, and enjoy the holiday season!

Here is the unmasked reporting link:

https://forms.gle/AQwRc93JWY7pt6mA9