It is hard to believe our sweet Sarah has been home nine months!! She has accomplished so much.
God is So good!!!
Her English is coming along well. Especially after her melt down a couple of weeks ago, when she
finally told me (this girl can be STUBBORN), she was afraid people would make fun of the way she talks. After she found out everyone would be excited to hear her talking, she is talking more everyday. She is reading Dr. Suess and Young Reader books and some harder books with my help. We also work on comprehension to make sure she understands the stories. She is working with second/third grade language, English, grammar and spelling. We add her spelling words in each day along with her other vocabulary words. In the last couple of days she has written two short stories, about a paragraph each. We dated them so we can look at them in the future and see her improvement. At the home school convention we had her tested in math and decided to have her do pre-algebra even though she seems to know it already. She needs to be able to comprehend what she is reading a little better to understand the word problems. So far she is doing great with it. She loves working on her school studies. It breaks my heart to see her become frustrated and upset to the point of crying when she can't understand something. She can be very hard on herself, which we are working on. :)
Sarah likes to bake and help make dinner and is very helpful. When it comes to dinner this girl LOVES American food! She let me know that she prefers our food over Chinese. She loves hot & spicy! She loves to swim and play basketball. Yesterday we found out she likes to play tennis. A while back we were at a little get together at our friend's house and Sarah sat down and started playing their piano. DH dug out an old keyboard from storage and lets Sarah play around with it. Yup! Piano lessons are in her future.
Evolution is very strongly taught in China and Sarah was told that God is a fairy tale, a myth like Santa Claus. She laughed when I would talk about Jesus, (which upset Jaden). One day Sarah agreed with everything I was talking about the Lord. I knew she didn't believe a word and was just being compliant. So I called Lu, a sweet sister in Christ who is from China going to the U of A. She came and talked with her and also gave her a CD in Chinese explaining the truth about evolution. Lu also helped me to understand why Sarah was so compliant, that it is how children are taught to be in China, even to the point of lying to their parents.
We continued to go to our church because the Chinese church that is near us speak in Cantonese and she speaks Mandarin. Sarah loves the worship. She follows along the best she can with her English/Chinese NIV Bible. I know she doesn't understand much, yet she still likes going. A little while back during our few minutes of greeting people around us a Chinese lady I never saw before came up to Sarah and hugged her and told her she loved her. Sarah had the biggest smile and was just beaming. I wanted to thank and let the lady know how much that meant to her when the service was over but much to my disappointment she was gone and I haven't seen her since. I just love how Jesus knows exactly what we need.
The girls and I read our bibles every night together and Sarah doesn't want to skip a night. We finished the book of John and are now in Matthew. I try to do visuals when possible and hands on and we also read children's books that go along with whatever we are reading. We read a devotional for younger girls,
His Little Princess. I love how the Lord works His perfect timing with the devotional. One day Sarah was angry at Jaden and the devotional was about anger and the next day forgiveness, (she looked at me and smiled). Another book we are reading is a book called
Leading little Ones To God The book uses the
Old KJ version for the scriptures and in the prayers, I just
use the NIV for the verses so Sarah can follow with her Bible. The stories are in regular English and taken from God's word and they direct you right to the scriptures.
So shall My word be that goes forth
from My mouth; It shall not return to
Me void. But it shall accomplish what
I please. And it shall prosper in the thing
for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55:11
