Hello everyone. I hope you are all doing well. I hear it is beginning to get cold there, but here it is beginning to warm up!
The past few weeks I have been working a lot with the educational part of the children's lives. Many of them are behind where they are supposed to be and through testing that we did last week, we have determined that basic math and reading is difficult for them. We thought this would be the case before the testing but now we know more of what level they are on. The main reason for the testing was to then help them enter into a self-paced system of learning to help fill in the gaps of what they do not already know and reinforce the foundation level material to give them a base to continue to build. Right now they attend the public school but the local christian school uses a self paced system that is willing to work with Oceans of Mercy and the public school to try to help these kids get caught up before we lose them. No one involved has done this before so we are all learning and there is no map for us to follow. It is exciting to be moving in a direction that is all for the benefit of the children. With all that being said, we are looking for others who might be willing to come here for at least a year and help teach the kids. You dont have to be a teacher, just someone who loves to work with kids and willing helping to educate. If you or someone you know might be interested, let me know and I would love to help them get connected.
In addition to this, I have continued to work with some of the kids on their life story books and they are looking awesome! They seem to really be enjoying the process of creating them and I'm excited to see how they turn out! I also got to hear, for the first time, some of the older girls sing last week. They have beautiful voices and I hope to be able to post a video at some point. They really love to sing!
