The past week was a little intense for our inspirational speaker. If you remember, last year Jacob had his launching as an inspirational speaker at Cebu Children of Hope School. He then spoke at one of the local colleges. After a long rest of not giving speeches, Jacob got booked at two different schools last week; Baptist Theological College (BTC) and Southwestern University’s (SWU) Physical and Occupational Therapy Department.
The 3rd and 4th year students and teachers of BTC lingered around after the short program. They told Jacob how blessed they were hearing his testimony. It was an awesome experience not only for Jacob but for Ginda, Joemar and Wilmar who attended the program as well.
Wilmar was asked to give a
sample of his singing voice. Without any hesitation, he stood up, grabbed the
microphone and sang “One Way.” It was amazing to see him singing with so much
confidence. Ginda and Joemar, on the
other hand, were surrounded by students and teachers talking and asking them
questions.
The 4th and 5th year students at SWU also had a lot of good questions to ask. They were interested to know what kind of physical therapy exercises Jacob receives. Some were also interested to hear more about CSC itself. Others recognized Joemar as a server at a fast food chain. Wilmar graciously sang “Let It Go” from the movie Frozen.
The therapy department at CSC continues
to do its best to pursue this endeavor—exposing our special needs kids to the
community and in turn teaching the community through this effort. Keep us in your prayers as we look for new
avenues for these special needs young adults.
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!
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!
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:
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.
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!