Staff Blog

Well, we are fully operational!  Up and running, full steam ahead as last week started a new school year at Cebu Children of Hope School.  Fifty-one eager students showed up in the parking lot on Monday raring to go and we have had a very good start.  The kids are excited about a lot of things:  new school shoes, moving to a new class and teacher, reading new stories, new folders and notebooks.  The teachers spent two weeks preparing for the new year before the kids even arrived.  But the hottest news around school is all the new curriculum materials we have. 

This doesn’t sound very glamorous, but it really is a big deal and a little bit miraculous.  We, the school staff and kids, have affectionately dubbed the three people who made the purchase of new science, civics, Filipino and Bible materials possible, The Three Grandmas.  Three wonderful ladies heard about our need for a bunch of new curricula and they graciously provided all of the funds for the materials!  Wow! 

For the first time in school history (18 years) we have a full formal elementary science curriculum.  We are in seventh heaven. 

The Philippine Department of Education issued new Filipino and civics curricula in the last couple of years which we had been hoping to purchase and now we have it all!

We also added a few more Bible materials to update and beef up our resources for Bible classes. 

What a wonderful, unexpected blessing to get all of this new material in one fell swoop.  We can’t thank The Three Grandmas enough.  Each day when the kids use the new books and experiment equipment, we’ll be reminded of these three ladies' generosity and God’s provision through them. 

They can do pretty much anything!  It's amazing!  OK, they're not your regular surgeons.  They are CSC's construction surgeons and they can create or reconfigure almost anything to make it better or different. 

So we (Principal Cris and I) had this idea to rearrange the principal's office during the summer break to open up the space and make it useable for a resource room when kids needed behavioral or academic help away from their peers.  The trouble is that the office is tiny and has built-in cabinets across the middle of it, dividing the space into two little rooms.   We asked Jerry, the head surgeon (aka CSC Facilities Director), if he could reconfigure the office to make it one space, taking out the cabinets and mounting them on a different wall so they could still be used.  Another idea was to have sliding doors made to still have the option of closing off the office when more privacy is needed.

School ended last week, so Jerry and his team of surgeons got going right away.  Cio (CSC construction and maintenance) is the main surgeon when it comes to these kinds of projects, so he started to carefully extract the shelves without wreaking them.  Verhilio (CSC maintenance and plumbling) was support surgeon and Bobong (school maintenance) helped with moving the shelves once they were cut out. 

And so before our very eyes, we can now envision a new function for the principal's office.  These guys are great.  They tackle projects without hesitation and think anything is possible.  I guess it is!

At exactly 10:15 the kids are suddenly all excited.  Why?  It’s time for math, their favorite subject.  The kids are eager to start a new lesson on time.  We start the discussion and I ask them questions to spark interest. “What is time?”  “Why do you think time is important to us?”  “Why do we need to use our time wisely?” 

The kids come up with thoughtful answers.  One student replies, “We only have one chance to live, Teacher. All things are just passing by.  That’s why we need to use our time wisely.”  I am really happy to hear this type of answer.  It shows they are thinking that things are important and have different purposes.

Everyone actively participates in the discussion. They are excited to use small clocks as a manipulative tool while they answer some time questions as a group.   They are now ready to try the short informal assessment on their own. 

“To be in your children’s memories tomorrow, you have to be in their lives today.”  These words are running through my mind right after the activity.  It’s sort of related to our topic about time.  My time with the students is never wasted.  It is a blessing given by God.  I will forever treasure this journey as one of the significant events in my first year of teaching.

Last October we entered the Support Give-Away Contest for Resource Mate, the library automation program we use at Cebu Children of Hope School.  It doesn't sound too glamorous, but we thought it would be worth it to submit the required essay to see if we could win a year of free tech support.  The essay had to describe how Resource Mate helps impact our community.  Well, we just found out we won the contest!!!  Woo Hoo!!!

Here's the essay we submitted:

It’s library day and Eugene wants to check out the next book in the Ranger’s Apprentice series.  He looks at the spine label and heads to the “Fla” part of the Fiction section.  Juliet wants to check out a Clifford book.  She read one in her class and is excited there are more books about Clifford.  I help her look in the Easy section and we hunt for the spine labels that have “Bri.”  Mary Grace is ready to tackle chapter books and wants to know where to look for ones for girls.  I point her in the direction of the Fiction section of books with spine labels that read “Ame” for American Girl books.  Maybe she’d like to try a Junie B. Jones book too.  The Level B reading class is studying about camouflage.  A bunch of the kids ask where to find books about animals that use camouflage.  We brainstorm about how to do that and someone remembers that we should search on the Resource Mate computer using the keyword camouflage.  The Reading Challenge contest is in full swing.  Kids race into the library each day to return their books and check out a new stack to read at home.  Teacher Amanda comes into the library looking for books on the theme of risks and consequences.  She searches and finds a number of books she can check out and keep in the classroom for the kids to read while they are working on this topic.  Teacher Alfie stops in right before leaving for the day to check out some books to read to his girls at home.  Sounds like a pretty normal day in the life of a library. 

But the library at Cebu Children of Hope School is anything but normal or typical in this city of 866,000 people with one public library.  Our library serves the community of children who reside at Children’s Shelter of Cebu, an orphanage in Cebu City, Philippines and the staff who work with the children.  All of the children who come to live at Children’s Shelter of Cebu are from the surrounding communities on the island of Cebu or neighboring islands.  The vast majority of the children have either never attended school or have attended very little.  When the children start attending school at Children of Hope School, they often do not know the letters of the alphabet much less how to read.  Usually it is safe to say no one has ever had a book read to them.  Needless to say, they have never seen a library. 

The children are thrilled to learn what a library is.  No one has to convince them how cool it is to browse the shelves of books and check out books to take home to the shelter.  Teachers have also often never been inside a proper library.  To have an automated system and thousands of books at their fingertips is pretty unbelievable.  The children and teachers are taught how to look for books in the library.  They learn what spine labels and bar codes are and how the books are organized on the shelves.  They are taught how to search for books by title, author, subject, or keyword.  The children hover around the Resource Mate computer in the library eager to have their books scanned so they can start reading their selections. 

Most of the children who come through the doors of the shelter and school are adopted either locally or internationally.  Currently the children have been adopted into families in fourteen different countries around the world.  The experience and knowledge gained at our school and in our library goes with them to their new countries, communities, and families. 

On the surface, the little library at Cebu Children of Hope School seems pretty normal, but every day really is a little bit miraculous in our slice of the world on the tiny island of Cebu in the Pacific Ocean. 

“Its not about what the teacher covers; its about what the students discover”.

The month of February at CCHS is not only Love Month but also Science and Math Month.  As a part of our science activities, we went on a science field trip last week to the University of the Philippines’ traveling Science Exhibit.  The kids enjoyed trying the various inventions and technology presented at different stations.  They were eager and curious as they roamed around the large room.

One of the children led me to one of the booths.  He told me to touch a small piece of gold colored metal. Suddenly I felt like I was being electrocuted!  Then the student said, “See, Teacher, the feeling is so weird!”  He called some of his friends over to try the experiment with him.  They held hands while the one of them touched the metal.  They all laughed when they each felt the current pass down the line through their bodies. 

Hands-on learning is important.  It motivates children to be more curious about the things around them.