Staff Blog
Last March the National Achievement Test (NAT) for Grade 6 was administered by the Department of Education. This is a nation-wide test given to all students in their last year of elementary school. This was the first time we had any of our students take the national test because we had been exempt from taking it in the past. The rules changed recently so we had two students who qualified to take the test. To be honest, we did not have a good feeling about what the results would be because of a planning glitch in the Department of Education. We had not been informed of the exact day the test was going to be administered, so we had to scramble the day of the test.
The results of the test did not come out until about 6 months after they were taken. Cris Tabra, the principal of our school, was attending a private school administrators meeting a couple of weeks ago and she noticed one attendee looking at a print out of the results of the NAT. She started looking at the back of the list of results for private schools in Cebu City. When Cebu Children of Hope School did not appear on the back couple of pages, she kept turning forward to the first page. There was the name of our school third on the list! Our students had done well enough to rank third out of 98 private schools in the city. Wow!
The girls were excited they had done so well. Their efforts at school paid off in a big way. The teachers might have been even more proud and excited than the girls. What a great encouragement for all. As teachers we are thankful for the children's achievement. We are also very thankful for the reading and math curriculums we use. Both programs expose the children to a broad knowledge base and prepare them to think critically. Thank you for being a part of Cebu Children of Hope School, praying for the students and staff as we gather each day to learn and grow.
Our Third Place Girls!
J-O-Y!
Loving life....and more specifically....hackysacks! :)
Thank you to our visitors for giving every kid their very own hackysack---as you can see, they were eagerly received!
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SRA Day!
Last Friday was SRA Day at school! SRA is our reading curriculum so it includes reading, writing, and spelling! We spent the morning having some fun reviewing things the kids had learned in SRA throughout the year. It started off with one student from each level sharing why they like SRA. Then we had a cheer competition. The children were divided into four groups and each group had 10 minutes to create their own cheer about SRA or reading. It was cool to see what they came up with!
After the cheering competition was the spelling contest! The kids took turns writing letters or words on the white board as a review of things they had learned. They also drew pictures that related to some of the themes our classes had studied. Some of the older kids went up and explained how their pictures related to the theme.
The final part of the program involved several presentations by our kids. The Level A students performed sang "The Alphabet Song". Jaime and Pretchy each did a beautiful job sharing poems about reading! Shiela & Rowena sang a duet of "America the Beautiful", a song they learned in one of their reading units. Then three of our Level C students shared stories they had written during class.
Here are some more pictures from our exciting day!
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Friends
Friendships are an important part of life at CSC. Although most of our children have siblings at CSC (about two thirds), they all seek out friends in their age group and enjoy hanging out, playing, making music and talking about life. Our kids can easily find friends who have similar backgrounds and can understand and accept what they have gone through in life. Some friendships can go on for several years, depending on how long the children stay at CSC. When a child leaves for adoption there are often sad friends left behind who wonder if they'll ever see them again. In some cases, friendships that began at CSC can pick up later on when children are placed in the same geographical area. Check out a few pictures of friends at CSC:
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Movie Night
One of the things we often hear at CSC is laughter, and one of the best places to hear it is during a movie night.
It's hard to organize a trip to the movie theater, so often times staff will gather up a group of kids and setup the projector in the library at the school. The movie night below was a "girl's night out" that Teacher Lindsay organized. However, being the IT guy, I was allowed to attend because I had to setup the screen and projector. :)
The movie was Mr. Popper's Penguins.
It's hard to see much in the video below, but it's really fun to listen to the laughter of the kids.
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The Littlest Waveboarder
Waveboarding is the cool thing to do during playtime here at CSC. Lots of the older kids got waveboards for Christmas, but recently more and more of the little kids want to try the waveboards as well. The other day I noticed this little lady trying out her older sister's waveboard in the driveway and I couldn't stop laughing - it was so cute! And she's so good at it!
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