Growing Up and Learning

running, running, Abish is always running

listening to the Bible story

Two posts ago, I talked about how our two babies are growing so fast.  Now our little guy is not little at all!  He turned three at the beginning of this month and he continues to amaze with all that he is learning as he grows.  He absolutely loves reading, and can now recognize the letter "A" although we never specifically taught it to him.  He also knows most of the colors in both English and Spanish and can count from 1 to 10 pretty well in the two languages.  He bursts with energy and only has two volumes - loud or louder.

blowing out the candle

We celebrated his birthday the Sunday before the actual date so that other kids could participate, too.  Everyone had a good time with simple games, a Bible story, and then sugar chocolate cake (decorated with a Spiderman face) and soda.  Abish enjoyed himself thoroughly.


Of course Leilani is also changing every day.  Her energy level is on par with Abish´s, and she chases after him in her walker or bounces enthusiastically in the jumper.  We have to keep a close eye on her when she´s on the bed, because she rolls all over the place.  Soon she´ll be crawling.

Speaking of learning, not all that long ago, five children begin attending tutoring at our house four days a week.  The girls are sisters, and the boys are their nephews, although they are about the same age.  None of them attend school, although three of them went for a short while some years ago.  The two oldest have a rudimentary understanding of reading, addition, and subtraction and work very hard at learning more.  They ask me for more work,

certificate for finishing book 1

more homework, and are so pleased when they can read through two paragraphs in the Mas Luz book that I use for their classes.  The younger boy (8 years old) can´t read

yet, but he likes the leveled readers that have pictures with one or two words.  He can do a bit of addition, although he is only just learning the names of numbers past eight.  The six and seven year old girls are at zero.  They have no academic knowledge at all, so my job at present is to try to teach them how to learn.  The youngest didn´t come to tutoring at all last week.

Aside from academics, we also teach Bible stories to the kids.  Abraham uses The Action Bible´s pictures as he tells the story in Spanish.  He follows the story with comprehension questions and then with prayer.

The situation in both families is difficult.  The fathers are completely out of the picture, and the mothers are alcoholic. The seven year old girl´s face is paralyzed on one side from a dog bite years ago, and there is a baby sister whose knees are backwards.  Please pray for us to be light to the families and for God´s intervention in their lives.