TROJAN UPDATE

Dropout Center Helps the Less FortunateThis is what the firefighters do with the money they raiseat the Chile Cook off! It involves the whole city and benefitslots of schools. My job was checking in the TUSD schoolsand I know there was a bunch from Sunnyside also. We letthem know how many boxes we can handle and at the endof the event we all line up in our cars and they load us up.It is very well organized and a fun project to be involved infor community service. We will repeat the whole process onthe weekend of the 17th and I will bring another load hereto the school. The boxes have a huge whole chicken, carrots,potatoes and the makings for a holiday meal including afrozen Marie Callender pumpkin pie!From the WorldLanguage Department- Susan Curtis, Dropout CoordinatorIn the spring of 2011, the World LanguageDepartment was awarded an EEF grant to helppurchase materials for an Authentic LanguageUse Library. With these funds we purchasedcomputers and equipment that would assist usin creating audio visual recordings of authenticlanguage spoken or signed by native speakers.In the ASL classroom, Ms. Escalada-Westland hada guest speaker from Gallaudet University comeand talk to her classes. Gallaudet University isthe only university for the deaf in the world. It islocated in Washington, D.C. and is now accepting 5% of their incoming undergraduates from the hearingcommunity. She is also in the process of making connections with the Arizona School for the Deaf andBlind so that students can work firsthand with deaf students in Tucson.In the Spanish classes, students in the advanced classes made storybooks of traditional Mexican legendsand will be visiting elementary schools in the spring to read to Kindergarten and 1st grade classes. Thenative speakers will be videotaped and these videos will be used by the lower level classes as a source ofauthentic learning.In French, students are continuing to learn that French is used worldwide as an everyday language;outside of Europe, French is spoken by over 100 million people on four other continents. The advanced(third-year) students are currently preparing to recite a 17 th century fable by Jean De La Fontaine.We also recently received a grant from the Catalina Foundation to help us purchase more equipment toassist us with the Authentic Language Use Library which will include web cameras and headphones sothat students can communicate with others in the community via the internet.- Alicia Lara, World Language Dept. ChairTROJAN UPDATE December, 2011 Page 15