I just learned this week that my internship will end on June 5^th – 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.