Social Service Work

We are blessed with many 11 and 12th graders doing the required 80 hours of social service required of every student in Panama. Yesterday we started with a group which worked with us last year when they were in 11th grade. They are from La Salle a private school and they like to have me speak to them in English. Now in 12th they are back for 8 weeks and each have one or more girls assigned to them. These pictures are from another group of social service students from a different school who were with us in February. In this picture a student is working with Kenia on practicing the multiplication tables.
Here Sinilda is working on reading or math. She is one of the two girls (sisters) who attended school last year as the first women in their family to go to school. Both did well in school and are now in 2ond grade. There is no (or possible only a very small chance) that one of them could skip a grade to bring her up closer to her age peers. This year her older sister is sending her girls and boys to school with money she makes by selling me backets and masks which I then sell to people visiting the church here.
This young women is working with Evelia. Evelia has some learning differences. After 3 weeks she had learned to print the first two letters of her first name - and that is quite an accomplishment.
Here Graciela is improving her skills in writing paragraphs and in understanding what she reads. She is in 6th grade this year and again I am helping her with math. While I was visiting my dad in the last three years of his life I set about reviewing arithmatic and basically I have mastered it up through 7th grade plus a very little bit of beginning algebra. Yesterday I helped Graciela with subtraction with natural numbers (the ones we count with) because she had to understand some properities of subtraction. One is that if you add the difference (that is the answer) to the smaller number you will get the bigger number. This has a special name in Spanish. The second is that if you subtract a 0 from any number the difference (answer will be the number you subtracted from) and right now I can't remember the third one but when I have the book in had I can explain it!

The last week was very full and we received a new girl into the home who is Maria. I will post pictures and introduce her soon.

Tia Sue