It was neat to see Saw May Htun, Saw Mo Lin, Nay Nay Noi, and Aye Aye Thin — the four children of our refugee family — come to our church’s blood drive/potluck/movie night Friday evening. Saw May Htun really wanted to give blood, but he’ll have to wait until he’s established residency here for three years. They did help us fill bags that were distributed to residences near Cornerstone Church later in the weekend as a thank you for being good neighbors. On Saturday, the entire family — including dad despite his bad leg — participated in a Cornerstone service project at Children’s Home of Easton. And Sunday, I was surprised and delighted that three of the children came to Cornerstone for a worship service.
Earlier in the week, a trip to apply for Social Security cards and another to an orientation session at Catholic Charities went well. We are still looking for jobs and an affordable first-floor, one-floor apartment.
I’ll close with a great report on the first ESL session with the family from Eileen Snover, who heads up the translation committee and gave me permission to share this:
Dave,
Just a quick note to let you know how our first session went. Claire and I
met with the family at the Youngs’ home in Phillipsburg. We were there for
about 2 1/2 hours. We were able to complete the first lesson. We quickly
realized that the children know quite a bit more English than the parents.
However, the children have been taught in what I’ll call ‘Asian methods’ -
rote memory or the ‘drill and kill’ method. What I mean by that is that
although they recognized all the numbers and letters, and can even
phonetically ‘read’ in English, they don’t comprehend the English words they
read. For example, even though the oldest boy and girl are able to ‘read’ in
English, their comprehension is not there. For example, he was able to read
the word ‘catalogue’, and she was able to read the word ‘sandal’, but in
both cases, neither understood those words. The mom will need the most work
as she apparently has not had the exposure or opportunity to learn English
to the extent that the others have.
We left the student workbooks and some materials with the family and
explained to the Youngs how they can help between now and Tuesday, which is
the next scheduled class with Claire. I will return on Saturday, and hope
that by the following week we will have other people to add into the
schedule.
Becky also had a whole bin of materials left from when she worked with
preschool aged children, and I told her that it would be helpful if the
family could have free access to those as well.
My plan is to use the lessons as they are written, but once the terms are
introduced, spend more time on the reading, writing and comprehension aspect
with the children (pushing them farther with the materials and information
covered in each lesson), and going a bit more slowly with the parents. It
actually worked out really great to have 2 of us there today as once we
covered the main points of the lesson, I took the kids to the dining room
where we worked on reading and covered a bit of sentence construction with
word cards of the vocabulary covered, while Claire worked more intensively
with the mom and dad on reviewing the vocabulary, alphabet, numbers, and
writing of the first 3 alphabet letters.
Once the family gets used to what to do, I fully expect to be able to teach
the new content with the whole group, and then split the parents and
children into smaller groups and take turns doing the more intensive work as
appropriate (reading, writing, recognizing and comprehending text with the
children; basics with the parents).
Overall, it went very well. There were lots of smiles and laughter from
everyone involved. The children, of course, laughed loudest when one of the
parents made a mistake, but it was all good natured because they would laugh
at themselves as well.
Thank you again for the opportunity! It was very tiring, but very exciting
as well.
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