Getting to Know You

Today we went through the alphabet and the letter sounds as a group and then took each kid to the side and tested their letter/sound recognition, the ability to read short words, and writing.  McKae administered the assessments and I took copious notes, finding patterns in problematic sounds and letters.  While the older kids brag that Khmer contains 32 vowels, the younger children identify each of our vowel sounds as ‘uh’.  There is no distinguishable difference between V and W here at CICFO, both sound like W and both say ‘we’.  The idea of resting your teeth on your bottom lip to create sound is foreign.   We'll start with that.  I know that learning correct pronunciations will help them be better understood both as we work with them and in the future. 

Natalie interviewed a number of the children to learn more about them and how they came to be part of CICFO.  She kept the rest of the kids entertained while we worked with them one at a time. 

There are more than 30 children who reside in CICFO.  We’re working on putting names to faces and coupling that with skill level.  It’s difficult, but we’re working. 

We’re starting at the beginning, teaching letter by letter.  We are working with letters we know they have a difficult time with, correcting pronunciation errors as best we can.  “V” instead of “we”, “guh” instead of “juh”.  We sing a lot.  They know kids’ songs:  BINGO, 5 Little Ducks, Down by the Bay, etc.  I’m here with the capacity to teach music as well as help with English and computer literacy, so we’re learning little songs that reinforce the letter lessons of the day.  With that and the odd requests to play Beiber and Celine Dion, we’re quite a musical bunch. 

Our oldest groups of kids come to learn at Botevy’s house which is where we are staying.  We have the computers set up on desks in the entry room.  The first thing we did was had the kids jump on the laptops and mess around with things they already knew.  After a little bit of that, we asked them to copy from a children’s book for a while, to see how they were typing.  It was clear that we needed to familiarize them with the QWERTY keyboard.  Our internet wasn’t working at the time, so we opened up a word document and started finger exercises, starting with the home keys.  

“A S D F, A S D F, F D S A, A D S F, F D, F D, F D, F D, D F, D F” 

And so it was, for half an hour.  We did similar exercises until we had familiarized the kids with each of the letters on the keyboard.  These are really sharp individuals; they’re catching on really quickly. 

We can’t wait to move onto things that are less painstaking for us, but we’re ready to take whatever time it requires to ingrain the basic skills into their muscles and minds. 

We are not the first volunteers to come teach these kids and with ICHope here, we hope to be the first of many to come.  With consistent teachers coming and working, these kids will be able to form a steady progression and be more successful in retaining the difficult information that we bring with us. What we’re doing is admirable, but it would mean very little without the people from ICHope that will come after us.