Staff Blog
Teacher conferences about the students are different at the shelter. The teachers meet with the house parents and child development team to talk about the academic progress of the children. I like hearing about the progress and growth of all the children. The teachers have great insights into the children. And of course they also have some funny and heartwarming stories to share. Here are a few for you.
This
girl asks the teacher each morning, “What are the things we need to do this
morning?”
She
is a little teacher, helping explain the lessons to her other classmates.
The
teacher says this boy “brings happiness into the class.” His house father gave him a math word problem on day, “I give you one banana and one mango.
How many fruits to you have now?”
He answers without missing a beat, “Fruit salad!”
Five
students are in the pre-kindergarten class, getting ready to move into
kindergarten next year. They are
learning about animals and their babies.
Dogs have puppies. Cats have
kittens. Pigs babies are piglets. One of the kids asked the teacher, “What are
baby fish called?” This boy answered the
other student, “Fishlets!”
This
student remembers previous topics and connects them to current topics,
sometimes interrupting the teacher. He
tries spelling out new words to himself as the teacher is explaining the
meaning. He is enthusiastic about
learning and knowing things.
She
does not like holidays because she likes school.
The
teacher says, “Her presence makes class enjoyable and challenges other
students.”
He is
kind-hearted and caring toward his classmates.
She is eager to share her ideas and answers, sometimes before the
question is read. It is hard to answer
correctly when the question is not known.
Many
days he can be heard offering help to a classmate, “Let me help you.”
“Her
interest in everything in school helps her tackle difficulties.”
The
reading challenge just finished and this girl did not win. Her teacher overheard her say, “The winner,
she reads so fast. I will win next year.” She is striving to improve.
Science class started learning about natural resources. This student raised her hand concerned, “What
are we going to do when they run out?”
She knows the right question to ask from the beginning.
Here is some of the students' work from the first quarter. Enjoy!
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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