Thursday was the last day of school for the kids so we started summer vacation. Playing outside, sleeping in, catching up on cleaning out rooms, etc. We are preparing for the girls to come in 1.5wks.
We never did get ahold of Snezhana. I have had a SMS on Skype going 24x7 for a week. Skype will retry for 24hrs at a time and then fail... it'll also tell you when it was successful. Unfortunately this means S' phone is off... I doubt she got a new SIM card as they are at camp. Hopefully it's just that she lost the ability to charge it. It's hard as D wants to talk to her every day now that his mornings are free and the last time we talked to her she was really sick and couldn't really talk. Right now we just ask for prayers that everything is ok and she'll be able to come for hosting.
If there is something wrong with the phone we'll have to find a way to get her a new phone... for both the girls actually assuming things go as planned. We'll also have to figure out a way to get more minutes for the phones as we only have 7wks of minutes left. With the SDA shutdown in July for a while it gets a little more complicated but God will work things out.
Back to Dennis... we have an educational meeting on Friday where we understand the school is going to try to put him in special education at a different school because he's so far behind. Um... a kid who was NEVER really in school, is 4 months in a country with a new language, and you are concerned that he's not ready for 3rd grade?
Yes, he certainly has learning difficulties but NO ONE knows what they are or how severe they are. All the standardized learning tests are meant for people who know English, were born in America, and are educated in America... he scores at essentially a preschool level "floor level" for nearly all categories. As an example of the culture bias, the tester made a big deal of pointing out he thought he was 7 and he didn't know his birthday... well, he was supposedly 7 when he went to the orphanage and the kids there lose sense of time. Even his sister who is quite intelligent had lost track of the age of her siblings and still thought Dennis was 7 until I walked her through it. On the birthday... he didn't even get a birth certificate until 2007 and we actually don't believe it is accurate... but more so, he was in a culture where he probably had never had a birthday celebration and would not have a reason to remember the day. The tester dies not on nearly every test that it is potentially invalid.
In American after 2nd grade he'd have a [hopefully] stable home, 2 yrs pre-school, 1yr kindergarten, and 2 yrs elementary... not 4mo of school. Anyways... I rant, please pray that the administrators will listen... even the specialist we saw told us NOT to let the schools push him into anything yet.
On a humorous note on his evaluation... they asked him what an oven was for in both English and Russian. His answer... "chicken!". I burst out laughing when I read that in the report. If you'd read previous posts, he LOVES chicken... he'd eat it every meal if he could and starts asking if he can have chicken when he wakes up. He KNOWS an oven is generally for cooking but from his perspective it only serves one important purpose... I bet he'd say the same thing about the BBQ.
He impressed us this morning... he was reading the brand on the cheap sunglasses we bought him that he loves. He's never been asked to think and simply looks at things (letters, colors, shapes, etc) and spits out whatever he wants. With reading it's always "D E N N I S". So I decided to see how well he's doing retaining what he knows since it has been a week since he really did anything in school... "P L A C E". Right the first time... so Ashley grabbed the alphabet cards and he only missed 1 after an initial review. That's really good... we were all impressed.
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