I just learned this week that my internship will end on June
5th – that’s insane! I cannot
believe how strange it feels knowing that in 18 days, I will no longer be a
part of the Stepping Stones team or the songbird of the FRC department. On a side note, Wendy and the rest of the
team are ordering pizza for both me and another intern for our last days!
I had to
write that on the notepad, the only way of communicating with Felise that I
have nowadays. I don’t like it at all,
but I don’t suppose I have any other way.
Email seems almost impersonal.
Anyway, she is coming back from Korea on Monday, so she should be
reading my updates while I’m putting these in the mailbox marked “Astor.” I do hope I get to see her in person before I
leave.
The twins
are sick again this week – nothing serious, just congestion – so I’ve been
working more and more with the boy whose language skills have been developing
very rapidly lately. We all have been
working on filling in each other’s’ gaps in the Spanish language, and our
teamwork does seem to be paying off.
This boy’s mother has reported that he is responding verbally to her all
the time nowadays rather than just pointing or glancing like he was doing just
one month ago. It’s amazing have quickly
he’s picked these skills up.
I made the
Welcome packets this week – 4 hours’ worth of them. Gracious professionalism once again (although
I did get to sit in a chair while the copier was going for quite some time, which
was nice, even if I did manage to cover the entire counter in the resource room
with copies, files, and staples.) I
really am glad that I got those done, though, since we had just run out of
them.
Speaking of
packets, I actually consider the cancellation of class on Thursday to be a
blessing when it comes to time management – making Welcome packets is so time
consuming that with the amount of time that I usually have left after all of my
other duties, I would scarcely have time to set up the whole process before
having to put it all away again. Having
such a huge chunk of time worked very well, in this case.
My goal for
next week is to make sure that the twins have not regressed much in the time
they have been gone (that is quite common when the kids go on vacation or get
sick for extended periods of time). As
for long-term goals, a measurable mark of long-term effects my internship is
having on these kids is social blossoming of the student with social anxiety –
we’ve all been working on getting her to open up and speak (audibly, if at
all), and in the last few months (and especially last week) we’ve been seeing
our efforts being paid off.