NEWSLETTER: Dandenong campus (April 2005)

Saturday 16th April is our first week 5 celebration for 2005, and we have been lucky enough to secure a visit from the Polyglot puppet company for the occasion. The puppeteers from Polyglot will take our students through a puppet-making workshop (with the assistance of all volunteers!). We are sure this will generate many English language practice opportunities, so please feel free to work on some short performance ideas for the following weeks if your students are interested!

We hope you will also be joining us for the upcoming information session for SAIL tutors. The sessions will take place after lunch, and drop offs. It will run for about 45 minutes. We encourage you to come along as it is ideal opportunities to pick the brain of someone whose brain is good for picking on the subject of making SAILing more effective and enjoyable.

Tim Burch will be presently the session. Tim is one of the SAIL Panel of Experts members and comes with a wealth of knowlesge not only of SAIL (he used to volunteer at Footscray) but also about learning strategies and behavioural issues. Tim is presently a teacher at Wesley College. He will be talking through some basic ideas for SAIL tutoring as well as being available to answer your questions, concerns and quibbles.

Bronwyn has been doing a wonderful job with organising the driving roster for this year; this aspect of SAIL is vitally important as without our fleet of drivers our SAIL students would not be SAILing. You can help Bron with this task by letting her know if you’re available to help with pick-ups, either as a regular or emergency driver, and by checking your emails regularly and letting Bron know if you’re available to assist. Thank-you to all those who are already helping with pick-ups.

Just a note to ask each and every SAILor to please make sure that the area and utensils they use of a Saturday please gets put away at the end of the SAIL session! That’s all!

Beginning 23rd April, the next theme will be “Sudan”. There are already plenty of resources and worksheets available to support tutoring on this topic, so please browse the Tutor Resources section of the SAIL web-site for heaps of ideas. If you create or find any worksheets or lesson ideas that everyone could benefit from, please let us know and we’ll photocopy and disseminate them.

There is now an official back-up system in place for every tutor and student. The purpose of this is so that when you can’t come, your student has a consistent and regular back-up tutor. Please see Jackie or Matthew to find out who you back-up, and also, who backs up you! Please make sure you are all aware of each other, and where possible, introduce your students to their back-up tutor - maybe do some joint activities – so that when you are unavailable for SAIL, your student will know who they’re to be working with. Where possible prepare your student and their back-up tutor for your absence.

Thinking of taking your students for an excursion to the comedy festival for some quality belly laughs? There are some great free shows as part of this year’s comedy festival. On Friday the 8th and 15th of April from 5:30pm at Federation Square there are free performances including roving comedy performers, the highly acclaimed singing, 4 Noels followed by a comedy cabaret and a the comedy channel short film festival competition screening on Friday 15 April from 8:00pm. While from 2:00pm on the afternoons of Saturday the 9th and 16th there are there is a comedy showcase on the main stage with various performers.

A reminder that any excursion requires the completion of an excursion form signed by the student’s parent and also requires at lease 2 tutors in attendance.If anyone knows of any other shows, sporting or cultural events for which we could request free tickets please contact Anna Grace Hopkins on SailHomehelp@africanoz.com .

Free photocopying is now available through the generous assistance of the Monash University Student Union. If you would like any photocopying of worksheets or books please let Jackie know on Saturdays. All students have their own folder located in the portable filing box in alphabetical order so that they can be easily found at the start of each week. There are also a number of exercise books available for students’ work at SAIL; please feel free to make use of these, either as a workbook, journal or an “About Me” book – one per student.

Thankyou so much to everyone who has completed their police checks. If you need a form or some advice about this process please feel free to email or speak with Jackie about this.

The SAIL Dandenong library is coming along in leaps and bounds. Under the new steerage of Leonee, books are presently being sorted and prepared for the funky loft library. A staircase to access the loft space above the stage is in the early phases of construction. When this is done and the looks are loaded, SAIL Dandenong will be the official home of the single coolest library in the world… in our view at least!

The switch of email systems from melbourneemail.com to africanoz.com has gone by almost without a hitch! There has been only one problem courtesy of My Hotmail. If you have a hotmail account, please ensure that you are receiving SAIL emails into your inbox and not your trash folder. Please put the SAIL email accounts on your “safe list”.

Excursions are a great way to get some “down time” with the Sudanese SAILors and, as a general rule, SAIL is supportive of these ideas. We do have one rule in this regard though; an excursion can only be undertaken by two or more SAIL tutors at a time and only after an excursion form has been completed. It is available from the Tutor Resources section of the website. Please organise these ahead of time on your next trip SAILing out and about!

Edition 1 of the SAIL Star is ready for review! Our thanks to all the contributors and the masterful editor, Lauren. Submissions for the next edition, in five weeks, are being warmly received already! Librarians are ready and willing to accept any input from any SAILor!

SAIL now has free borrowing rights at Melbourne’s largest toy library network. By mentioning your association with the SAIL Program at the Toy Library in either Winter St, Stonnington (call 9500 1673) or the Frankston Toy Library (Victoria’s largest) you will be allowed to borrow toys for SAIL free of charge. In the interests of making this relationship an ongoing feature of SAILing, we ask everyone to be vigilant that the toys returned to the toy library go back in as good or better condition than they were borrowed in. Our thanks go to Laura, Dandenong tutor and SAIL sweet talker, who organised this privilege for the wholeSAIL team.

Sick of the SAIL answering machine? Most people were! The problem is now solved. Thanks to the generosity of the Collin St Law Firm, Blake Dawson Waldron (where Will and Matthew used to work), SAIL now has its own switchboard team. Trish and Rosemary are there during business hours to cheerfully answer SAIL calls to the business hours number, 9679 3272. Please give Trish and Rosemary a call if you can’t come, if you need to get a message to us or if you want to chat about ancient bonsai practice in Inner Mongolia… we hear Trish and Rosemary are really into that.

1. It’s not often that the SAIL newsletter gets a world exclusive but on this occasion we have (almost) managed it! We are thrilled to be able to inform you that your indirect connection with Sudan is about to make you much cooler. Prepare for your street cred to go sky high. Sudan is about to be the subject of a major Hollywood blockbuster starring (and here’s the world exclusive rumour) “our” Nicole. The film is a silver screen version of the best-selling book about the British woman who married Reik Machar, a rebel leader in South Sudan. The book is well worth a read and will put you one step ahead of the pop culture ball game, “Emma’s War” by Deborah Scroggins. We are told (by a reliable source) that filming will begin and we can expect a release in 2006 or 2007.
2. On principal we always try to get the best of whatever is on offer for the SAIL kids. Unbeknownst to us, we managed to outdo ourselves with the performer who enlivened our SAIL birthday in 2003. Farnaz Sabet came to SAIL as part of the clowning troupe, Clown 9. Farnaz was recently named the Victorian Rhodes Scholar for 2005. Like we said, even the best ain’t good enough for us so a genius clown seems quite befitting! Congrats to Farnaz!
3. Finally, in a boost to your ego and as a reason to continue SAILing, we are pleased to report that volunteering has been found, by thorough research paid by foreign tax dollars, to improve volunteer’s sex lives. Research from the Community Service Volunteers (CSV) in the UK found that volunteering had improved the sex lives of 17% of all people polled.. In addition to the findings the poll also discovered that a quarter of people said volunteering has helped them lose weight. Yes, folks, SAIL is, in essence, helping you be slim, trim and happy in bed. You can thank us later for the assistance?!

Thank you all for keep the good ship SAIL on a steady course and offering of your time and good will so consistently!

Matthew and Jackie