Taste, Touch, and Smell

Hello Everyone! As I mentioned in my last blog, Corni and I have began teaching two classes at the Peris School. This is a school for children with special needs. The needs range from behavior problems, learning disabilities, autism, and developmental delays. Some of the students come from the orphanage that is housed in the same building and some come from the neighboring village. The kids from the village seem to come from very poor families and most of the time at least one of their parents has a metal disability of some kind as well. The teachers at this school do a great job with the training and resources they have and have always been open and willing to partner with us and learn together. The main question for me as I was thinking about what to teach this year was what will meet the needs of the students? The teachers really desire to have an English class. This is an easy thing for me to teach, but does it meet the needs of the students. I delved into my teaching days at Marion, before I moved to Romania and I resurrected one of the favorite activities of my students during that time: Taste, Touch, and Smell. This is an activity that checks a lot of boxes. Each week I bring in a food item. The students have to close their eyes and then they touch, smell, and finally taste the item. They have to give me a list of adjectives to describe the food, without saying what the food is. Then after we have a list of adjectives we have someone (preferably from outside the room), that reads the list and guesses what the food was. This is a multi-sensory task and allows the kids to experience new things and develop language skills, plus its fun! We then take the list and I teach them the English words as well. Along with this we are doing some Character development with a Bible Story each week. I have three teachers that are participating as well and they are as enthusiastic as the kids!

Another highlight from October was that Ruthie turned 11! I don't know where the time is going! We had a nice birthday with some of the H2H family as well as a few of Ruthie's friends from church. Her favorite dessert is cheesecake, so instead of a birthday cake we had a birthday cheesecake this year!