Staff Blog
For the past month and a half, the older girls of CSC have had the chance to experience "girls night". Almost every weekend, two girls are invited to my apartment for an evening of fun!
The event starts long before the weekend even arrives. On Monday after school the group for the week is told that they are invited to girls night. Their excitement is immediate, and only builds over the coming days. On Wednesday the girls are given menu choices. I have a variety of dinner dessert choices that the girls have the chance to agree upon, and then make. Many of the foods on my list are meals that are uncommon here in the Philippines, so I often have to explain what the meal consists of. So far, each group has chosen something that they have never tried before!
At 4:30 on Friday, the girls meet me at the guard shack. From there, we get a ride down the road to One Pavilion, a shopping center near my apartment. I give the girls a list, and they are then responsible for finding all of our needed ingredients. Once we check out, we make the trek to my apartment on foot. It has been fun to provide this experience for the girls, and have the chance to teach them life skills like cooking and grocery shopping. When we arrive at my apartment, I give the girls instructions on how to prepare the food. Everything we eat that evening will be prepared and cooked by the girls.
Cooking has been a joyful experience for all involved. Jonnalyn and Andrea enjoyed mixing up and frying meatballs. Jannice and Pretchy made some interesting choices in dessert (corn and cheese ice cream!!). Joanna Mae and Hannah devoured their tacos (they each had about 5!). Adelyn and Ven Ven went into a sugar coma with s'mores dip. Cheryl Mae and Sarah got messy kneading cookie dough.
The final event of the evening includes watching a movie. With these girls, it was no surprise to find my collection of chick flicks exhausted. Like any teenage girl, the girls of CSC are saps for a good romance movie...especially a Disney one! Watching their reactions to particular scenes has been the most entertaining part for me. Cheryl Mae almost started hyperventilating as the kissing scene in Pride and Prejudice approached, Jonnalyn giggled constantly during A Cinderella Story, and Janice melted at the romance in The Lizzy McGuire Movie.
With the rotation of teens finished, I can say that girls night has been a great success! I look forward to many more nights of fun with these wonderful 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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