Staff Blog
The other day we celebrated graduation at Children of Hope School. In addition to the 10 graduates who received their diplomas from the elementary and pre-school departments, every student got a special award. It was such a great day and lots of tears were shed, many of them by 
the woman sitting next to me - Marlys. Knowing the stories of each child, it is very emotional to think of the circumstances that brought them to CSC and the many things that they had to overcome to be walking across that stage to accept an award. One little boy has only been with us for a couple months. His twin brother died just before he came to live with us. The smile on his face walking across the stage told us that he is on the way to emotional recovery. Another boy had recently been abandoned. He woke up alone one morning. Now, just a few weeks later he was getting an award for doing good work in school. Another had been living in an orphanage where the director was abusive and had ended up living alone on the streets for a year. Now he was getting a medal from his teacher for being Best in Writing and Most Attentive! An 11 year-old girl who had been badly burned in a tragic fire in her home was also being awarded. Her smile lit up the whole stage! Children who had never been able to attend school before coming to live at CSC were being recognized for their achievement, hard work and positive behavior in school.
Children of Hope School is a place where every student is honored, encouraged and given a chance. For some it is a first chance at school. For others it is a place of second chances. And last week it was a place for getting an award and the satisfaction that comes from being appreciated. Every student has something they are best at. And, like the plaque near the door says, "We don't care where you come from, but we care about where you are going."
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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