It’s been a while! We have changed a lot within our service since my last post. The kids are always excited to come and visit and spend time with us. We had a lot of trials and a lot of errors with different activities. Including, colour matching, reading in the Library, picture describing and direction following. We also tried to connect the vocabulary they were learning to terms we would like to use in the pool. This was working ok, but it was not a good long-term plan, so it was time to implement something new.
This is when we came up with our new reading plan. We acquired 3 sets of Scholastic, ‘first little readers’ books at 3 different levels. This plan was going to work much better in the long run because there is a huge variety when it comes to the English knowledge of the SOS kids. There were some who knew lots and knew how to somewhat read and write and then there were others who had no clue and we had to go through the phonetic alphabet with them. So with this new plan, each SOS kid would be able to learn at their appropriate level and hopefully, we will see some progression. It also helped us to have a more structured time frame, where we do reading and English for the first 15-20m then we head to the pool or playground. Each OSC student in the service group has a buddy that they can put all their focus into. To start the program off we had to figure out where their starting level was. So each OSC student took a level A book and we used the 5-finger rule (see description in Figure 1). This enabled us to find the right difficulty for our buddies. We then are planning to log what level book they are on each week in order to keep track of their progress. So far this process has been working and I am very excited to see how this progresses in the future.
When it comes to the swimming aspect of our sessions we first started with trying to conduct basic swimming lessons but this was always quite chaotic because of the language barrier and they weren’t as interested. But we found that giving them a chance to just play and have fun in the pool for the whole time was a lot more beneficial to OSC and SOS kids. It gave the OSC kids a chance to really bond with their buddies and just have a good time. Some of the SOS kids are not able to go out much and they don’t have access to a swimming pool so it is something they really look forward to so we felt that taking away the structure in the pool worked better.
I hope that we continue to build bonds with the SOS kids and continue to help them have a good time as well as learn English. I hope that we can document their reading progress and that this system is something we can implement next year as well.