Staff Blog
“I’m just a kid and you are a teacher.”
I laughed and I was amazed at the same time when I heard this statement from one of my students. We were doing our oral development activity when one of my students refused to make his own sentence using the new words we had learned that day. Other students were thinking hard and constructing sentences using the words, but this student was struggling.
I called on him and at first he
was very hesitant to share because he was not ready. He hadn’t formulated even
one sentence in his mind, so I gave him few more minutes to think. The class discussion had been really good;
other students were enjoying the activity and sharing their sentences.
Again I called on the student and I said, “Hey buddy, I think you’re ready to share your sentence with us. You look like you have been thinking hard.” He smiled and looked at his classmates. They cheered for him and encouraged him by saying, “Try lang.” (English-Cebuano for “try please”)
I stood beside him, cheering him on and praising him as well. He stared at me and said in a nervous voice, “Teacher, I’m just a kid and you are a teacher.” I caught myself beginning to laugh when he uttered these words.
Then I stopped and told the student and all of his classmates, “Yes, you are all kids and you’re still young and I was once a kid too. But let me ask you these questions: Where are you right now? Why are we here? Have you thought that maybe we both have the same goal and purpose?
We are here in school to study and to learn. This doesn’t mean that I’m a teacher and I know everything. It’s not as simple as that. Learning is a two-way process. You learn from me and I also learn from you. I’m here to help, teach, guide and mold you to be a better person in the future.”
After our conversation, the student was able to formulate his own sentence and everybody clapped for him. In the back of my mind I told myself I’m lucky to be a teacher. I may not be rich with jewels, but I’m rich with good and happy memories because of my experiences. I have a lot of memories already to ponder in the future.
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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