 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show. The terminology is up for debate and some people have strong opinions on it. But whatever you want to call us, we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. We do the record the shows every week, so if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can always go to our website afterwards and see our recordings that are all posted publicly onto our YouTube account. Any presentations people may include, handouts, documents, we post them as well, and any websites that might be mentioned, we collect them into our delicious account for saving websites, saving links, and that'll be available to you as well. Both the live show and recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with any of your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody who might be, you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. They are welcome to watch, join us on Wednesdays or watch any of the recordings we have posted out there, and I'll show you where all those recordings are at the end of today's show. I'll show you our website and where you can access all of that. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, many print training sessions, demos of services and products. Really our only criteria is that anything we do is library related. Either something libraries are doing, programs are doing, events they're hosting, software resources they're using, or anything we think might be of use to libraries. Some of our sessions are Nebraska-centric, things that we're doing here at the Library Commission, of course, but we are a national show, so we have all sorts of topics that are from anywhere and be of use for any libraries, not just Nebraskans. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations, but we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. On the line with us and on the camera, as you can see, is Elizabeth Rivera. She is from the Los Alamos County Libraries in New Mexico. Good morning, Lisa. Good morning. She's got a session for us about doing ESL's programming. Conversation Circles is a really very interesting idea that they came with there, which I think is really fun and creative. She's going to tell us all about their conversation circles at the library that they're doing. I'll just hand it over to you to take it away. Thank you, Krista. Hi, everybody. Just to get started, I had a picture of me in case the webcam didn't work. It was me wearing my book earrings, wearing my book skirt, reading Sandman to a Robot, a Skeleton, and a Unicorn. Perfect. Sounds like a librarian to me. I am originally from San Juan Puerto Rico. That's where I was born and it's also where I went to school, where I went to library school at the University of Puerto Rico. In my library career, my first library job was, as a shelver, a page in Snow Isle Library System in Washington State. It's their fault. I'm a librarian because somebody left one of those ALA publications in the break room. I don't know. Around 2000, 2001, there was this terrible fear that there were not enough librarians in the pipeline that all the baby boomers were going to retire and there was no way to fill those jobs. A huge retirement was going to come, yes. I know. I think anybody who was thinking about libraries or involved in libraries, they'll remember that. So I read that in the break room and well, that the rest is history. I've worked also as a school librarian, aside from a public librarian, back home in Puerto Rico at a private school. That was the K-12 school and in public libraries, I've also worked in Cougs County, Oregon at the Coquille Public Library most recently and now in the Los Alamos Public Library here in New Mexico, where I'm the reference librarian. That gives you a little bit of my background. So just to really dive in, what is the deal with conversation circles? Where did this come from? For us, it came from a patron. It was her request. It was a Japanese mother who always brought her baby to all our programs and she really wanted to practice English because she wasn't going to be in the United States for that long. This is very common for our community. If you're familiar with Los Alamos at all, you know that this was a community that was founded essentially to build an atomic bomb. This is why they still call it the secret city in some cases because it was not known that there was a community here or they were at least trying to conceal it. They didn't conceal it that well. To this day, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is here and is the main engine of employment for this tiny community, but it makes it extremely international. People come from all over the world to work here and they may be here for three months. They may be here for three years. It's unclear how long they're going to be here. We just have this very dynamic and diverse community in a very sort of oddball place up in a little mountain town in New Mexico where you would expect people to the second most common language to be Spanish. It isn't. It's actually Chinese. It's Mandarin. Looking at that, language other than English spoken at home, I checked out the census. The national number at least in 2013 was about 21%. New Mexico, it's about 36%. I checked out Nebraska before we started here and it looks like you guys are about 10.3. But I'm sure those of you familiar with various communities in Nebraska that that can vary widely between one community and another. For example, here in Los Alamos, our percentage of language other than English spoken at home is higher than the national but lower than the New Mexico. It's a little somewhere in between there. And it just really depends on the demographics of your community. Who's there? What has been happening? Who's employing? What kind of immigration there has been? And historically, what immigration there has been? If there was a particular community there and their family came and their neighbors came and that's continued through the years, that makes a big difference in who is going to live there and how many generations they've been there and what language is spoken. So why did we do this? Obviously, we had a patron request and we take those pretty seriously but it also covers these three bases and these are things that are probably on everybody's plans and all your strategic planning, serving the underserved, supporting lifelong learning, building community. I'm sure you're all familiar with those phrases just from, like I said, your strategic planning. Frequently, patrons who speak languages other than English can be underserved in a lot of libraries. They probably aren't in, say, Queens which has put so much effort into approaching their different language communities because they are the most diverse place in the world. But for most of us, maybe we're just not prepared to really address the needs of these different linguistic communities. Supporting lifelong learning, of course, that that's at the heart of what all of us are doing and we're doing it across the board. We want to provide those opportunities and building community was particularly important to us because of the demographics of who is going to attend these and we're going to talk a little bit about that. The planning. So this is how it started. There was a bunch of research and I went crazy with the research. Typical librarian, I'm sure it would have happened to you. Don't do like I did. I wound up reading Paolo Freire and, you know, pedagogy of the oppressed and going really deep into ESL theory, but that's not really what was needed for this. The questions that we answered that were really the important ones at the end of the day or what is already available in the community and that helped us answer a couple of different questions like what is being addressed and what is not being addressed? Who is being served and who is not being served already in the community? How do we not duplicate efforts in the community but work together? How are other places doing this? There I did a lot of research. Canada in particular, in Canadian libraries and community centers, there's wonderful research going on and in universities. There's a lot of work going on with conversation circles. I particularly wound up patterning this after the Ann Arbor program in Michigan. What is our primary audience? Thinking about who we were going to serve really paid off at the end of the day. It turned out to be key to the success of the program. So the first part of the study was what's already available. In our community what we found were two major programs. One were free SL classes at UNMLA. That's our local branch of the state university system. And yes, they were free but they were traditional classes offered at standard times. Although there was a night class as well. But it was a very traditional classroom experience so we knew we weren't going to duplicate that. None of us are ready to start teaching ESL. And the other program was the Rio Arriba Adult Literacy program. And Rio Arriba technically is the neighboring county but they also include us in their service and there are also volunteers who go to Rio Arriba to work with them. And they mostly do one-on-one tutoring, which is key. They were working with individuals, not with groups. So that started to show us where the focus was in the community and what was already happening. So how are other places doing this? From looking at other libraries, universities, all kinds of institutions that were running programs like this, calling them conversation cafe, conversation circle, ESL circle, conversation tree, I saw in one place. I saw that most places were using volunteers. The emphasis was on a relaxed atmosphere. This is really key and you're probably going to hear me say it 20 times before we're done. The relaxed atmosphere is key and there's little to no focus on grammar or other technicalities. It's just communication. The focus is being able to communicate, to get your message across and we're not going to spend a whole lot of time explaining grammar. So what would be the program cost? That was something that we were concerned about. What was the real investment? We knew that we could commit to doing 45 minutes to one hour sessions once a week. So that was a time investment that we were willing to make. The prep time varies between 5 and 20 minutes for each session. And we wanted to use volunteers, but of course we weren't really ready when we started. So we used staff, mostly myself, and I trained volunteers to take over for me as we went along. And the volunteers in our case came from an existing volunteer pool. Here in Los Alamos we have a situation that's actually similar to the one I encountered in Coquille in Oregon that we had a lot of people who wanted to volunteer in the library, but they don't want to shelf read. What you need is shelf reading, let's be honest, right? But that's not what they want. They want to feel like they're really making a contribution and to be engaged. You kind of need to entertain your volunteers as well. And we didn't have jobs for them. And this is a common situation for us. My volunteer coordinator will come to me and say, hey, I have this person or these three people that just showed up. Do you have anything for them to do? And frequently we don't. But this time I said, hey, look in the volunteer pool, see if we can come up with some people who might find this interesting. And we got lucky. People found this very interesting. They really felt like they were contributing to the community. So we had a lot of engagement. How to train the volunteers? So there were two keys to this. We asked the volunteers to come and observe and participate for one or two sessions or more if they felt maybe a little hesitant. Sometimes people were really concerned that they were going to have to be English teachers. And that's really not the key here. So have them visit so that they really see what it's like. And I provided them with a volunteer handbook. My volunteer handbook is patterned very closely on the one from Ann Arbor, Michigan. And Crystal will be posting a copy. I'll be sending her a copy. If you want a copy of the Ann Arbor, Michigan one, I have permission from them to email it out to anyone who requests it. But I don't have permission to publish it. So I'll be giving you my email. And if you want to see the original that I patterned my volunteer handbook, mine is much shorter. It's very streamlined. There's is much better. We can post that. Yeah, belong with the recording afterwards. You guys all have access to it. Not a problem. Yeah. And like I said, Crystal will be posting a copy. I like the streamlined one because it's a lot less overwhelming for the volunteer. If I give them something that has seven pages as opposed to something that has 40 pages. So I really wanted to keep this very informal, very relaxed. That is just the real key for this. So the training manual highlights, just so you kind of get an idea of what's in there. Keep it casual, keep it friendly, keep it light. You what you really want is for people to feel comfortable speaking a language that is not their own. So the atmosphere is key. Encourage equal participation. So you as a facilitator, rather than teaching English, what you're trying to do is provide everybody with an opportunity to talk. And to kind of keep an eye out for who's not talking and how can I draw the mountain, bring them into the conversation. And the manual has a few tips and tricks for that. Have backup topics and ideas. I can't tell you how many times I thought, Oh, this is going to be a hot topic. People are going to love to talk about this. It's going to be so great. And I got crickets. Nobody was interested in this subject. So you have to have a little bit of flexibility. And again, the manual also lists places where you can get ideas where you can think about what are good topics to talk about what are questions I can ask. Make sure they understand you and understand each other. And this is an important part of just watching everybody, making sure that communication is being achieved. And it's not just somebody talking and everybody else tuning them out because they don't understand restating things, rephrasing things in in other modes of expression changing your words to make sure that everybody is on the same page and that there's a real conversation going on. And to remember that until cultural communication isn't just language. Obviously, aside from verbal language, there's body language. But there are cultural expectations. There are things we take for granted, values we take for granted. And being aware that those things can come up is going to be key because it will help you negotiate any situations that come up anything uncomfortable that may come up and explain things. Also, it's a great source of conversation material. When we look at what I thought the weight of what I was saying was versus what you understood or what how that reads to you. And that's really important. And again, in the manual, I go into that a little bit deeper. So the other question we had, what is our target audience? For us, what we figured out our primary audience was the caretaker to a small child or infant. They may have older kids, but they're definitely home with a child, a small child. This made it extremely difficult to do one on one tutoring, or to do the class environment, because you can't really bring your baby to the classroom, although our instructors here at UNML are pretty flexible, but it really doesn't work out so well. These people may be in the United States only briefly. Sometimes they're not sure how long they're going to be here, contracts change as they go along. They're going to come with varying degrees of language proficiency. Some people show up and they are absolutely fluent. Some people are really struggling. All they've had is an introductory course before they've got here. So you're going to have a lot of different levels. And what we came to understand about this group is, yes, they're definitely interested in the language, they're definitely interested in developing their language skills. But they also were seeking social connection, especially for someone who is the primary caretaker of a small child. It can be extremely isolating to move to a new community, much less to a new community where the language is not where you're comfortable. Your home all day with this small child, maybe the only time you get out is baby time, which was something we used to our advantage. But they were looking to meet people, to get to know other people, to get to know the community. And this was something that really worked in our favor and that really helped build the program. So planning and marketing then, we thought about who this audience was. So we cross promoted with the other ESL programs, even though we thought there wasn't going to be a lot of overlap between us. But because of the network, people who knew other people in their native language communities, other family members who maybe couldn't make it to these classes, and with youth services. Our youth service program promoted us by verbally and by using handouts during their programs where we had that target audience already there. Those primary caretakers were there at baby time, they were there at story time, and you could speak to them quite directly. We also used the baby time room because as baby time is organized in such a way that they've formed a circle of chairs around a play area. So we've got a corral to sort of trap the children in there. And we already knew that we wanted to welcome those kids. So we needed to think about a space that was going to work for that. And youth services said, yeah, sure, absolutely use our space. So we set it up right after baby time when the baby corral was set up and the kids were already there. We planned our sessions around the school calendar because there were a lot of people who did have older kids. And once school was out, they were not going to be able to come. And our flyers and handouts clearly welcomed kids. We made it, we tried to make it very clear that kids were welcome so that people would feel like they really could do this. So this is what our flyers and handouts looked like. And you can see sort of what I emphasized. Free, very important. People did ask us how much it was going to cost. So we edited the flyers. No registration. We got a lot of calls of how do I sign up? It's drop in exclusively. Make whatever sessions you're interested in. You can just come. And kids are welcome. So those three elements were key to who we wanted to attract. And we talked a little bit about the advantages on the back of the handout. Practice and improve your English, but also meet new people and learn more about our community. And those really were key elements. Conversation circles for us wound up being about more than just English. It wound up about really getting connected into Los Alamos and making friends. What worked? Yes, there were things that work. So I'm going to start with the good stuff. What went right? Having this clearly defined target audience was critical. Knowing that helped us choose the right time and place, helped us target the marketing correctly, and helped us out with word of mouth because the mommy network got activated. So that really worked for us. Riddles and logic puzzles. This was awesome. Even with people with very limited knowledge of English, but who could still string sentences together. Getting the riddles really, really worked. So let's try this one. Let's see how if anybody knows the answer to this one. Acting on an anonymous phone call, the police raid a house to arrest a suspect. They don't know what he looks like, but they know his name is John and that he is inside the house. The police bust in on a carpenter, a truck driver, a mechanic, and a fireman playing cards. Without hesitation or communication of any kind, they immediately arrest the fireman. How did they know which person to arrest? Anybody willing to take it? Anybody out there have any idea? Type in the questions and let us know. Believe it or not, this one was solved by the person in my group who had the lowest level of English. The person who struggled the most. Figured it out. Well once you know like what's going on, it's yeah. So no guesses? No, nobody's typed anything. Nobody has any idea, any clues, I guess. So what my, what the person asked me, she looked at me and she said, John, John is a man's name, right? And I said yes. In English, John is usually a man's name. And she said, were the other players women? That's what someone just typed in finally, yeah. The others were women. The others were women. And that actually was also a springboard to talk about gender expectations. Because what usually trips people up on this puzzle is the carpenter truck driver mechanic fireman playing cards. The expectation that those are male-dominated professions. So we took it from there and we talked a little bit. So from that riddle, one, we had the sort of the fun of we're doing riddles. And we also had a chance to talk about cultural expectations. And we sort of went on a little tangent there talking about, are there jobs where you really expect to find only men or only women? It was really a very engaging session. The game of scruples. And that's what I think is an example of how this works, that it isn't a standard curriculum. It's just we're going to chat about this thing and other topics and then you learn language at the same time. It's like a side effect. Absolutely. So the game of scruples is a game that you've probably played. This was actually a board game in the 80s. And it presents dilemmas like this. At a restaurant you own, you see a cook drop a lamp chop on the floor. Pick it up, wash it, reheat it, and serve it on a plate. Do you recommend the cook? And these are great because people really will come up with different answers and feel like they have the correct good answer for this and can't understand why you would think differently. For the record if you ever go to a restaurant owned by people in my conversation circles group, yeah that lamp chop is getting washed. Yeah, team lamp chops are expensive, was definitely in the majority. Well I suppose that's something to think about but there are also health codes. That the argument was presented. But it those kinds of moral dilemmas and you can one thing you can do to get these you can actually Google scruples dilemmas but you can also if you find in a thrift shop you can find a copy of the game of scruples and just have the little cards that come with the board game and that's great. And again this really leads to meaty discussions. Sorry pun not intended. It really leads to those moments where people say well why would you even think that? Why how can you and it really lets people express themselves. It was really fun. Would you rather also great you can also get this in board game form or Google lists of this. Would you rather be extremely hairy or completely hairless. Work hard at an interesting job or relax at a boring job. Be the best dancer in the world or the best singer in the world and why that's key you can't just let them answer I'd rather this than that. They have to explain and justify their answer and what I did with this one was I printed out a bunch of these on scraps of paper cut them out and put them in like a pretzel jar and I passed the jar around let people reach in pull one out read it make sure everybody understood it had all the vocabulary and of course some of these are incredibly silly. Would you rather be extremely hairy or completely hairless. So once the laughter dies down you'd have to go through that explanation why would you choose one over the other. This was super fun so we've done this multiple times because it's just so funny and I did find out that at least for the Japanese mothers they really feel strongly about being the best singer rather than the best dancer because of karaoke culture. So that also was a springboard you know tell me about why is it important and it gives you it just gives you a lot of openings to have fun and still get people talking and that's the key get people talking. Taboo this was also a board game in the 80s so you can probably get cards and you can also Google puzzles like this so you work with partners and you have a secret word that you want your partner to say and you want to get them to say that but you can't say any of the forbidden words. So to try and get somebody to say panda without saying China, bear, black and white, bamboo or zoo is pretty tricky and at first I was worried that this was going to be too hard that it was just that I was really going to stump people but they really got into the spirit of the game and came up with really creative solutions to try and get their partners to say the code word and I think part of that is actually because they're used to not having the right word and having to find ways around it so they're always trying to find a way to express themselves and maybe they don't know the exact right word they want to use because they don't know that word in English so they're always looking for these circuitous ways of communicating so this went over really well and again you can probably get one of these for a bucket of garage sale and it leads to a lot of fun and a lot of laughter this is something that I actually discovered the second year the New York Times has a whole educational section I was not familiar with it but I was going through it looking for ideas and they have a whole student section and it's not behind the pay wall or anything you can just access it it's really great and they have an entire section called what's going on with this picture and they have pictures like this completely stripped of context so now I'm going to ask you what's going on in this picture some crazy Photoshop pictures that ran with news stories really okay so then you start looking for clues what kind of country do you think this is happening in well I kind of assumed it was New York but I guess not huh might not be New York yeah looking at the uniform there it doesn't look like something I expect to see in New York yeah and I wish I could see the license plate a little clearer on that truck yeah that would give a clue it's warm though the South America somewhere or Mexico it's actually happening in Venezuela Venezuela okay yep yep it's in Venezuela and so I you can bring a few of these from this session in and start to talk about well can you see the license plate can you read the sign can you read the graffiti what are people wearing do these buildings look familiar what is this guy doing in the water so this is happening in Venezuela and this guy was a citizen who was trying to fix a broken water pipe so I probably because the the officer there do not seem and very much concerned just oh yep he's down there working on it so the reporter the photojournalist really saw this while he was driving around and he was trying to get pictures of everyday life in Caracas and he saw this and that this is awesome I got a picture of it and so many of the pictures are like this when when you first see them they seem ridiculous what is happening in this photograph for you so having that whole explanation well why do you think it's this country or why do you think this about this picture again gives you some material to kind of pull threads and have a conversation about it and it's amazing what you can do with a picture that's entirely out of context I don't know what is this and they have of archives and archives of these so that's really great I placed the link there and you'll be able to access it when the slides are up great stuff other topics that weren't food you'd be amazed how often we wind up talking about food always food what food do you miss from home what food can you not get here what food is it hard to make what foods do you like from from New Mexico that you've tried or what's been your experience with the Mexican food so food is always a successful topic you can always bring the conversation around to food no matter how often you've already done it places to visit in the area also very popular conversation topic most of these people were newcomers at least in our situation so they really wanted to know and even someone who who had only been here maybe one or two months more than somebody who just arrived would say oh the place I really like to visit when I got here was this and there would be great conversation and places to take the kids where are the good playgrounds what are good places to take the kids so those were also very popular and again it's the topic you can revisit health care turned into a surprisingly active conversation both the comparison with how is health care where where I last lived to here and also how do I get health care and who's a good pediatrician and who's the good OBGYN and what is your experience with your new doctor here how do I find a doctor and vocabulary this was one where we did a lot of vocabulary building people would say well I I need to ask questions of my doctor so I would print out some lists of vocabulary words for health again I just Google these to to give them some tools to talk to their health care providers this was very people really enjoyed that and what do you love about your country of origin I didn't know if people were going to get into that but yes people love to talk about what their country of origin is like or if they're people who moved around a lot which we have that too then they will tell you what they liked about all the different places they've lived so it would really develop or where they've traveled so that's really those were really good topics that that just really you can visit again and again depending on your group I guess another thing we just lucked out with our volunteers we were lucky I can't say enough about how great the volunteers we had what do you need in a volunteer is they need to be they need to have native language fluency in English that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be native speakers of English I my first language is Spanish for example but I do have native language fluency so we had several volunteers who actually came from other speaking backgrounds one was from the Philippines one was from India but they had native speaker fluency in English but they also had that great perspective that experience and intercultural communication that experience of being in a new country which gave them just a lot of empathy and that that's the key even if you can't find someone who has ever spoken another language or who's traveled a lot empathy and humor but just someone who's there willing to be open willing to make mistakes and willing to hold people's hands as they build their confidence which is really what you're getting at with the language skills here it's really building confidence that's the key to the good volunteer the other volunteer we had she was a native speaker of English but she had studied Russian and she had lived in Moscow and worked as an interpreter so again she knew what it was like she knew what it was like to have to learn a language go to a different country and and live a different life for some amount of time and we just got really lucky that our community had those people that that they were here and they were they wanted to help and they just brought that amazing those amazing compassionate hearts and life experiences that really helped them out this they also brought fantastic apple pie and apple butter very important food again food is always a great equalizer absolutely and the apple pie was a direct result of a request from a couple we had from China and they were here and they really wanted to try American things like they'd seen in the movies and that will come up again in a minute and she said well have you had apple pie no and she had apple trees and she baked pies so the next session she showed up with a jar of apple butter and this beautiful apple pie and let me tell you nothing goes over better than sharing food it always goes over there were some things that didn't go so well so let's talk a little bit about what could have gone better working with absolute beginners conversation circles can work across many levels but you can't work with someone who can't string together a sentence yet they have to have a basic vocabulary so you can't substitute formal learning you can't work with somebody who's starting from zero this was tricky for us because in my experience I have taught English as a second language when I lived back in Puerto Rico my mother is an ESL professional she was a professor of English in Puerto Rico for many many years and people underestimate their level of fluency you will meet people you would consider completely fluent and they open the conversation with I'm so sorry my English is terrible and I saw that in my students in Puerto Rico all the time people who were perfectly competent in English but their feelings of self-efficacy of their confidence in the language was low despite the fact that their skills were high it's a comfort level that they're lacking absolutely and that's actually what you're working with so I really worked hard on trying to talk to staff to anybody who might be at the front desk and might get a question about this and to put it on the on the fires all levels welcome because I wanted people who could benefit from it to show up to feel like they could show up we did get one or two beginners that were just not far enough along they really didn't have even basic vocabulary to do for example greetings and introductions you need to be past that stage you need to be able to say hello I am so-and-so and I am from here there this is you know these are my interests they need to be able to to get there I haven't found a way to sort of level that out because when people measure their own levels of fluency they're wrong they're just wrong they're better than they think they are and I don't want to do anything to discourage them but every once in a while you'll bump into someone who really they're going to be completely lost and how do you how can you address that need I don't know so that was one part where we haven't figured it out we haven't worked it out the group was too big or too small conversation circles has a sweet spot one morning after baby time we had fourteen people plus the babies that was chaos if that had gone on for more sessions I would have had to break it up two sessions of seven people that would have been fine fourteen people with fourteen babies wow I mean it was fun but I wouldn't say it was effective we had a good time we spent most of the time actually chasing the babies but it was just too big it you really lose the intimacy you lose the thread it was hard to keep everybody on the same page if you get this many people break it up you really want to be in in in a sort of smaller group but the group needs to be big enough we tried evening sessions because we got a request from one of our day sessions after baby time and she said my husband would like to come but he's at work all day can you do evening sessions and we got two husbands and that was it we were getting one or two participants for the night sessions which is why we wound up cutting those out entirely we did them for maybe half the year and then we cut them out because one person was just not enough to really keep it going so there there is kind of a sweet spot and that's that's key to truth sent a lie did not work has anybody ever played two truths and a lie I haven't played I seen it done but I don't we haven't done it I haven't done it ourselves I haven't done it myself yeah so I could not communicate how this worked and it never really fell for our group I'm going to tell you three things about myself two of them are true one of them is a lie right no let's see if you can catch me you can ask me questions to see if you can catch me in which one is the lie one I used to do synchronized swimming to I was once an extra in a zombie movie three I once lived in Florida uh give you three questions and see if you can catch me in which is the lie just where in Florida Miami Springs spring I have relatives in Florida not there not near Miami what zombie movie barricade it only made the festival circuit so independent zombie movie very independent I think my cousin financed that on his credit cards he and his buddies was the first of the synchronized swimming synchronized swimming I'd say this well somebody has a question synchronized duet or a team um neither one it was like an introductory class for little girls so we were just learning basic skills I never competed all right because I wonder what song did you swim dude was there songs at that no I never got past sculling and tub I was very basic yeah so let's go with the living in Florida got a couple people are saying that living in Florida is the lie living in Florida is true ah and believe it or not synchronized swimming is true the movie is false I do have a cousin who is a filmmaker from the independent zombie movie called barricade uh-huh but I didn't show up that night they were filming it was a school night and he said show up at the at the parking garage at 3 a.m. will dress you up as a zombie with all my buddies no 3 a.m. yeah at 3 a.m. no I've got school tomorrow that's not happening but it is a true film there but yeah that did not work I could not communicate the way to play this effectively and it didn't go over well at all so our results how do we do these are all the countries that were represented that have been represented in the past two years we've been doing the program I guess it's not quite two years yet a year and a half maybe that we've been doing the program and as you can see we've got a good spread we've got nobody from the African continent or from Oceania yet but I'm hoping I hold out hope and it's really cool that in this little mountain town we've been able to get such a great spread then for fiscal year 1516 or school year 1516 we had 39 sessions and 165 total attendance when we started sessions again in September we had a core group of of adding you know students from before who came back and they are really devoted to the program and they're they're the faces that you can expect to see at every session which is great the fact that they they felt so committed to it this year so far we've only had 26 sessions we're not done with the year yet but we also aren't doing the night sessions anymore so we've had 96 total attendance for adult programs this is actually very good we have difficulty getting adults into our programs and I guess that's something that a lot of libraries struggle with but this we're actually pretty happy with this at this time here's some feedback that we got and these are I know these these are our three hard core moms who always come and who become friends and they hang out together and their kids play together and they cook together and when one of them gets threat throat all the kids get strep throat so the next session is going to be empty because Lucas got strep throat so Elizabeth got it so then Sophie got it and next thing you know you can't make because everybody's off sick it's a social time for us but it's also a social time for the kids they can make friends and play it helped me to know that there are more people like me and that I don't need to feel embarrassed and this is a safe place where we can express our opinions and this really covers the gamut of what we wanted to achieve we wanted to achieve social connection we wanted to let them feel comfortable in the language and to feel that they're safe and that they can really develop their skills and it worked that was what we wanted to achieve and it worked then this is actually my house and in the front you'll see these Chinese couple and they were the ones who wanted to try out all the American things and I said well if you're in New Mexico you need to have a green chili cheeseburger and they said can we do that at a barbecue I said yeah of course they said we've never been to a barbecue we want to go to a barbecue like the movies so I bought my husband a grill that he'd been wanting and we happily gave them a barbecue and this is a part not the whole thing but part of our sort of strong circle of volunteers and participants in conversation circles at my house at the barbecue where everybody had green chili cheese burgers green chili cheeseburgers were had by all and everybody brought something it was great very all American so it was really fun that's so awesome to hear that they're wanting to look experience all of them it's just it's beyond just the learning the language they want to experience this new country that they're in and I assume these you said some of some of the participants aren't they don't know how long they're going to be in the country or whatnot I assume these guys were more like permanent residence here for three months I think it was the front couple in the back with the little girls they're actually they've moved to the states permanently they've got their residency they're from Honduras and then the couple the sort of older couple kind of towards the middle were volunteers so they live here they've lived here for many years and then that's me over at the edge I unfortunately cropped out my husband because he was trying to catch the dog but this was really to me this is really key that it was yes it was language yes it was culture but it was also community building it was connection right and we made those connections and it really paid off so thank you do you have any questions for me okay yes if anybody has any questions type them into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface and there is my email address that you can use to contact her later as well and ask for that if they want that full absolutely handbook that you had the really longer one well the shorter one that will post afterwards with the show notes and everything but you contact her to get that one I did I was wondering I don't remember if you mentioned what is your population served of your town how many people are actually in the 17,000 okay so you're pretty small you're one of them yeah that's a funny I feel like we're so big well it depends on your point of view I'll let those of you online know this was what it we have here at library mission we do our annual big talk from small libraries online conference that we did last month and this year we had a overabundance of submissions for a one day event I had too many that I couldn't even fit them all into the day and so many of our encompass live shows during the week the last this month and next month and maybe even beyond our presentation that didn't fit into the day and this is one of them kids who submitted this to our big talk from small libraries where we have our max either population served or if you're a school or university FTE is 10,000 which some places is like it depends on your yeah where you're coming from for some people that's too big for small even in other areas they're like what their libraries that small you know some large companies consider small libraries having FTE or population served of 25,000 or less here in rural America and Nebraska and Mexico and elsewhere that's not no you need to be a lot smaller than to be small so on the smaller side. If anybody is from a small library and they haven't done big talk for small libraries I can not recommend it highly enough I've been attending for the past four years it's great because it's free and online and there's always something you can use always and it's always recorded too so just like you know if you could make it the day of which we also that case for some of our presenters that we had to adjust around and work with is the recordings are up on the website now for anybody who wants to watch them so nobody has any questions nobody typed anything in okay that's fine this is great I think it's a really I had not heard of the conversation circles as a way of doing it so I've heard of the regular classes you go to specific sessions you know more curriculum based things I think this is a lot more fun and more useful I mean I I took language classes when I was in school and in high school and I wish even just in that case there had been more things like this so just sit and have a conversation rather than the road here's how you put together a verb and a whatever and when you get out there and actually go to these countries and have to try and speak and you know interact and live your life there doesn't always help as well as this kind of real-life experience I think no it and in the advantage for this is you can really do it without having a background in education in ESL this is really just about sitting down and chatting and having a good time and getting to communicate yeah and the community that's a big thing that libraries are more trying are into a lot more is being part of the community not just come here check out a book check out a movie it's you know a community center and a place for people to meet and extend expand their group like you said become my new friends and yeah that this fits perfectly right doesn't have a question we do have a couple people saying thanks so much that they learned a lot and they want to use this in their libraries so hopefully you'll have some contacts reaching out to you to get more information or the handbook out there all right we are just a little after eleven o'clock so it's a perfect timing to to wrap up our hour for today so thank you very much lisa thank you everyone for attending I'm going to pull the presenter screen back to my in here to do there we go should be coming up there we are all right so that will wrap it up for today show our on our main and compass live website here nlc.nabrasca.gov forward slash and compass live or you can just Google and compass live so far nothing else is called that on the internet yeah so whenever you Google it you'll come up with our website and our archives the other recording will be posted here on the website right beneath you've got our upcoming shows right underneath there's a link to archive and compass live sessions and here's last week's about small real libraries leading with you white space and all the same kind of thing we'll have the recording the presentation slides that lies will be sending to me and I did grab a couple of links here on the census bureau information that you are mentioning and the New York time on the New York Times checking out the pictures yep there we go yeah what's going on this picture right those of both be there but we'll also along with the presentation the slides will have a separate document of the handout that she'll be sending me as well so you have a couple of different things here that you'll be able to access so that will wrap it up today show I'll hope you join us next week when our topic is making space administrative weeding Scott Childers is our Southeast library system director on the Southeast corner here in Nebraska and he has a session about for library you always read your books and your materials in the library for the patrons and users what about the library director as a director and the administrator what do you need to read out of your files how long do you need to keep things for other state rules county rules whatever or just what's a good idea to keep or what is okay to get rid of and so Scott will be giving us a session next week on that so please do sign up for that or any of our other upcoming shows we have here I've got all the April dates up here on the page may will be coming up soon I've got all those days booked to just got to get their descriptions up so you'll see them coming up as well and come aside also on Facebook we have a Facebook link here and any of our sessions here's our Facebook page over here I post updates about when a new show is coming up when recordings are available here's a reminder from this morning to log in on the fly today show if you wanted to so if you are a big user of Facebook please do pop over there and give us a like on that side other than that that does wrap it up for this morning thank you very much everyone for attending thank you Liza and we will see you next time on and come for life bye bye