Joys of School

Despite the tough things happening now, God has still blessed me with the joy of seeing progress and growth in many of the kids during school. I've shared a little about about school, and mentioned in my last post about how some of the progress we have seen is just so encouraging! But I wanted to share just what this looks like and how awesome the past two days have been! 

Rachel, who is around 7 or 8, is a spit-fire of child, has a huge smile, loves getting into messes, isn't our best listener (has some trouble with keeping attention on a task or instruction), has an awesome laugh that can't help but make you smile, has such a deep voice that can be quite loud, cannot walk but can crawl faster than any child I've ever seen, loves to dance bouncing back and forth on her arms, and when we first started school hardly got any question right. 

I mentioned school has been slow in terms of progress and moving forward on goals and objectives, but for most of these kids this is the first time they've been in a school-like setting and their first exposure to really any letters or numbers, so I have been very humbled in thinking how I'd like to see progress and movement in school, to what is actually going to work with these kids. With that said, we have been working on six different letters (AINPST), both the letter sound and recognition of the letter, for the past month a a half, as well as the numbers 1-5, again both recognizing the numbers and being able to count to 5. Emily has a curriculum base from England, so we have this video that we watch that has a little song for each letter that practices the letter sounds so we are getting exposure to all the letters but primarily focusing other instruction on the 6 mentioned. Also in literacy, we are practicing their names - being able to recognize their names and the letter that it starts with. We we focus on numeracy, we have a couple of songs that we usually will sing that practice rote counting, then will do different activities that practice counting "how many" of something, recognizing and matching number symbols, or simply rote counting. Some of the songs and activities will practice rote counting higher than 5, but like the letters, we are primarily focusing on 1-5. 

Now let me tell you how Rachel is doing. On Monday and Wednesday this week we worked on our literacy objectives, and Rachel was a rock star! After singing our letter songs, when Emily was practicing with our 6 key letters, Rachel identified every one with the sound that each letter makes! It was quite surprising, but so exciting and I think had all of us cheering her on:) Then in breaking into our groups and working on names, Rachel not only recognizes her own name and can tell me it starts with an "R", but can recognize about 8 of the other kids names who are in this group with her, knows that Paul's name starts with a "pppp" sound, knows that Razia's name is not hers but that it does start with an "R" too! I know these sound like little things but they are huge accomplishments! Then today when we were practicing numbers and counting she counted to number 12 by herself! She hasn't quite mastered number recognition but rote counting is getting so much better! Again, may not sound off the wall exciting, but this is me and such a place where I find joy! And not only is she learning so much, but she's excited about it! The smile that takes over her face when she gets a question right is the reason I want to be a teacher and do what I'm pursuing! 

Just a little of joy to add to the hardships that have been going on this week. Despite it all God is still good.