Today was our final day with our family. We have grown with them through these last weeks. From the very start was trying to teach a little kid how to talk. Now, its like they have been speaking this language the whole. This just shows us that if you out your mind to learning something you can achieve it and they all did. I am amazed at how much they got to learn in such small amount of time. I hope they will be able to keep up the learning for as long as they will be living here.
Our on final day we did go over the review of what we have been going over the last weeks. This review was by far the best. When we asked them a question they responded, but before they would look at us and wait for us to say something to help them out. We read some more books to see how well they can still read sentences. This time though we got a little harder level books to test how much they really knew. They did fairly well. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, but I knew they could look at the letters and try to figure out some of the harder words. This time while they were reading to us, we would stop them and ask them if they knew what some of the words meant or had them rewrite the words on a piece of paper without looking. The reason we changed it up was because we know they can read the words, but they don't know how to spell them all yet or know the meanings. So, I wanted to test them to see how they would understand. The spelling was a little easier than the meaning of the words, but that's typical. When they didn't know the meaning or the spelling we would help out by saying the word symbol by symbol or explain the meaning with hand movements or phrases that they would already know. After the books were over we just asked them a few questions to wrap it up. We just wanted to how there experience was and how they learned from these visits. Wanted to see how they feel now after learning a wide range of words, body parts, sentences, and objects. How comfortable they felt now to go talk to people in our language. So, just a big over view of all of our visits into one.
We learned to teach the family in a non-verbal and verbal ways. Non-verbal was used when they didn't know what an object was. For example a tree, we would use our arms to demonstrate a tree and then they would understand. If they would look confused on what we were trying to say we would use body movements or us pointing at the things they didn't know. Verbal came into play when they couldn't say the words out loud or they were struggling. We would pronounce them out loud or try to spell the word out. When we would have to spell it out we would sound each letter and explain what letter it was. This was more action with our talking and for them to hear the words form someone else.
My experience from being with the family these weeks have been a changing experience. I never had the thought that people were going through these types of situations. What i mean is the struggle to learn how to speak and how there country is different from ours. I had a some what idea but never actually took into thought. I'm a person that needs to see it to believe and I now believe it. I'm just happy that i made a difference in this family life even though it was a short amount of time.Just knowing that there that much closer to being part of an American culture. Now, there struggle wont be so much on how to speak or hear English , but maybe other situations. I'm glad that the family has learned what they learned, but I hope for the best for them in the future.
