a post in pictures

We do have alphabet cards,

but they all have pictures on them.



It makes me wonder if they know the letter,

 or if they just have gotten used to the

picture of a violin for the letter V.



 I decided that it would be wise to have cards

 that separate the upper-case

from the lower-case.



This is the catalog of how we made them.



In hind-sight,

spray-paint would have worked better.

Then again,

if I had used spray-paint

the kids could not have been as involved.

They're not perfect,

but they are ours.

I still have paint left over,

I'll keep it in case we loose one of the cards,

it's bound to happen someday.

That's why we used face-cards,

they're easy to find.



*They're actually not easy to find here, it took a while.

Chakrya

Due to circumstances beyond our control, in spite of all prayers and blessings on our behalf (for which we are very grateful), McKae was very sick while she was here.  She is now home in the USA and doing her best to recover from the mystery illness that has caused her so much pain
.
As promised, I have a few of our writing exercises to share.  These are from Chakrya.  I've missed her for the past few days because she was visiting her home province.  Chakrya has a momentum when she works.  I've learned not to check up on her work as often as some of the others because if I interrupt too often she doesn't write as much.

This is one of our first assignments, when we asked the students to introduce themselves.

Hello my name is Sim Chakrya. I am 16 years old. I was born 05/ July/ 1996.  I have one brother and one sister. I come from Svay Reang province. I come to live in the orphanage 5 years ago. The children come to live in the orphanage because some children don’t have parents, some children have only mother and father is dead, and some children are poor. My feeling when I stay at home I can’t go to school because my house is far away from school. I don’t have food for eat enough. My parents they don’t have ability to take care of me and they sent me to the orphanage. But when I came to live here I am very happy because I have good mother, good brother and sister in here. I can go to school, I can study English, study how to type and I have a lot of food to eat enough. I have opportunity to study a lot. Every day I study khmer at school, I study English at the orphanage.  I think the orphanage help me and take care of me a lot. Mom here always give good advice for me and all the children. I’m very thank mom to take care me and I love you. 

 

Everyone here has nicknamed CICFO 'the orphanage'.  It isn't an orphanage in the traditional sense.  A few of these kids are social orphans, where their parents are unable to be present in their lives due to their own choices. Other kids have quite a different background.  Some kids, like Chakrya, have wonderful, loving parents.  But because the family is so poor they are unable to care for all of their family.  I like how the organization title puts it: This is a Children Friend Organization.  That is where Botevy has come in and given at least some of their kids a place to stay, enough food, access to education, friends, and love. 

Chakrya types 25 wpm now, with 96% accuracy.  I don't have a good example of her writing as it has been improving, forgive me.  For now this will do.  I'm so grateful to be working with such intelligent, motivated, and loving kids.

The King Father

The ribbon from Pattica

Some of you may be aware that Cambodia's former king, Norodom Sihanouk, died in China recently.  As a show of reverence, there has been no government school for the past week.  We've still held our classes at the orphanage, assured by the children that this was acceptable.  The kids invited me to come watch as the old king's body passed through the street from the airport to the palace.  The deceased is the father of Cambodia's current king.  The kids understand pluralization and possession, but have a hard time saying the 's' at the end of words, so all that morning I was told what would happen as the 'King Father' passed.  The children wore their school uniforms that have been donated by akin clothing.  The whole country seemed to follow the same dress code.  Pattica crocheted a ribbon for me, and had me pin it above my heart as the rest of the nation had.  It seemed that all of Phnom Penh lined the street, awaiting this procession.  From just after noon until almost 5pm we listened to the Gamelan, waiting for the passed on to pass us.   It is incredible to see the respect and love that the people carry for their king and learn more about Cambodia from the kids at CICFO. 

a place

We created an activity for the kids to help the teens practice describing a place.  We asked them to take any picture from off of the computer and write down things that they would see, hear, smell, taste, and feel if they were there.   
When they left that day, I decided that I wanted them to make a PowerPoint describing a place.  I sat down and created an example PowerPoint of Laie.  We're going to attribute the subject to nostalgia.

Today I showed them my presentation, and helped them as we decided on places that each could describe.  We started by identifying places that are meaningful to them.  For Pattica this was very easy.  He is very interested in Cambodian History, and knows more about places he's never been than I know about places I've lived.  The others had a harder time, but we made a decision and for the next few days I'll be helping them describe this place through PowerPoint.   

tell me about...

For the past few lessons, McKae and I have been working with the teenagers on description.
"Tell me about you."
"Tell me about a place."
"Tell me..." everything.

We're still without the curriculum, but we do have an unusual window into the exercises used by the EIL(English as an International Language) classes through BYU- Hawaii Online.  We have 3 students currently enrolled in EIL classes.  I've been assisting them in catching up with their coursework since we got a late start on the semester.  It's been very insightful.  Online education is definitely growing and it is opening doors that had been closed for so many individuals, but it is a very new thing for Cambodia.  Things that are very clear to me seem very abstract to some of our students here. 

To begin writing, we gave the students question words:  who, what, when, where, why, how.
They chose a topic and we asked them to write down two questions for each question word.
All of the students chose to write about CICFO, so their questions consisted of, "Who is my best friend at CICFO?" "What is CICFO?" "What do I learn there?"
You are able to write more about any topic if you can ask yourself questions about it.
After writing down questions, and talking with us about it, we had the students write as much as they could for 10 minutes.
The kids are in the process of typing up what they wrote, and we're helping them edit, after which we will post their stories.  You need to know how amazing these kids are, what better way than for them to tell you.  

It's an all-day thing

When we were in the throws of internship paperwork, McKae and I were told that we would be working 6 hours everyday- 3 with kids under 15 and 3 with kids 15-18- with an additional 2 hours with adults twice a week. 
For the first week we were here, that's how it was.

Then school started.  We wish it was that easy.

Here is what we know:

• Everyone goes to school in the mornings at 7am-- except group 1 and NahNah from group 2
• Group 2 comes back from school at 9:30am, but the rest of the kids are there until 11am.
• Almost everyone is home for lunch.
• Group 3 goes back to school at 12 noon, and the rest of the kids go back at 1pm-- except Sophanoth and Panith.
• Everyone is in school until 5pm-- except for Socheat, who is done at 3pm
• There is no school after 5pm- except for Socheat and Sophanoth who go to classes at 6 and 5 respectively.
• Lets not forget that Sunny, Yaya, and Sophanoth are also in online classes through Brigham Young University- Hawaii, and we help them go through that as well.  (which is great, I'm so thankful that we get to see how that works because it really is quite helpful)

We, the interns, would like to avoid teaching at the orphanage at night.  It gets dark pretty fast and it's a little bit scary, but just a little.  The more practical reason is that nobody likes night classes.  It's so hard to be motivated to go to more school after you've been at school all day.  Besides, what are we going to do all day?

So here is our current plan:

• Arrive at the orphanage sometime between 8:30 and 9am- work with subdivisions of group 1
• *those who can sound out new words *those who know all of their letters but refuse to sound words out *those who don't really know the letters at all
• 10am until we leave the orphanage around noon- work with subdivisions of group 2 from
• *those who can read new words and write independently *those who have a difficult time with letter sounds *those who can't read new words. 
• Come home and eat.
• Sophanoth will arrive around 2 to work on his online class with Sunny and Yaya.
• Panith will arrive with Sophanoth and we will have him do the same types of activities.
• Socheat will arrive at 3:30pm and we'll work with him and Panith until they leave around 5pm.
• Chakyra, Chanthy, and Pattica will arrive around 5:30. 
• Everyone will leave between 7-7:30pm.

Would it be nicer to work with everyone at one time? Yes, but everyone has such different needs that this way is probably better for them.  It's not too bad, we have fun with it, but it makes for long days. 

Learn something new every day

The school system is very different here, but it has started, which means that we interns need to adjust our schedules a bit.  I was a bit surprised to arrive at the orphanage and see only a few handfuls of my regular morning class students.  To add to the oddities of the day, the classroom door was locked and nobody was sure where the key was.  Instead, we played games. 

This was probably one of the most valuable things I’ve done since we began working with these kids.  Every child is at a different level, just like any group of children, and it is easy for some to skid by.  These kids are so excited every day to learn and to be with us and they’re even more excited when they know something.  There is a lot of yelling out answers all together.  It means that the kids who don’t know the letters or the sounds or whatever we’re saying can say ‘Aaaa’ and we can’t really tell. 

These kids can sing the alphabet and know all of the letters and sounds in order.  They can copy down anything you write on the board perfectly, but copying is all it is.  Some of the kids know their letters and recognize the sounds and words on sight.  Some of the kids can read simple words.  One or two of the kids can sound out words.  The others will look straight at you and guess words with the same starting letter, in hopes that you’ll give it up when they guess right.  Sounding out words is extremely difficult.  Other kids tell you the word because of the picture.  Other kids recognize the letter but not the sound when it comes out of order and some only recognize a few letters and guess on the others. The go-to letter is 'P'.

 

I have a few sets of Creative Child Games ABC Flash Cards.  We played ‘Memory’ and ‘Go Fish’ and it was certainly very illuminating.  We’re going to work in smaller groups from now on. 

 Today with the older kids we worked on plurals and tenses by telling common children's stories with our flannel board. Some kids are ready to tell stories on their own, but the others made it a group effort. It's my hope that they'll become more comfortable talking together in my class.  Like any school, we need to warm up to each other.