The Skills for Living Life!

Do you have what it takes to live life??

Probably a question we wouldn't normally ask ourselves, does it even take a "skill" to be able to live life?
Growing up in the United States with nurturing parents and relatives and receiving a good education ususally provides us all with the proper skills we need for living day to day life, however this is not the reality for most Deaf living in Honduras or other developing countries.

Simple tasks that we do not seem to think about, such as what to do if we run out of an item in the house, or even following simple directions can become huge obstacles for the Deaf who have not been taught how to handle such situations.
Who knew running out of toilet paper in the Mission House could become such a disaster?! :)

So, in order to help the Deaf, here on the northern coast of Honduras, learn the skills for living life they may have missed out on (due to a number of things... from home neglect, to late language development), Signs of Love has begun teaching a "Life Skills" Class once a week in the special needs school here in La Ceiba.

Each week, I teach a certain 'life skills' lesson to the Deaf Staff (Nancy, Fanny, and Orlan) and then on Thursday we enter the school for about three hours in order for the Staff to teach the lesson to the Deaf students in the school.

So far we have taught two lessons, both were a blast!!

Take a look at what all we learned so far:


The first lifeskills class was held on Thursday, February 14th.
To kick off the school year, we learned about dreaming big, and then we wrote/drew our dreams and put them in a time capsule. Everyone committed to coming back to the school 10 years from now, February 14, 2023 to open the time capsule!

We started the day off with a warm up game, "Make Me Smile".
The person in the middle tried to make people smile or laugh, if you smiled, you had to take the person in the center's place. It was so funny!

Fanny teaching "when you grow up"

"Put your thinking caps on!"
"What are your dreams for the future?"

Precious little Meylin!

After learning how to dream big, we made "dream journals" to record all the thougths and dreams we have for the future.

Nancy showing an example of "dreaming big".

After we all recorded "where we thought we would be in 10 years", we burried our thoughts along with photos of us all at the school and committed to all coming back to unbury the capsule in 10 years!

The following Thursday we held our second Life Skills class.
This time we practiced working as a team, and learned the importance of unity.

 

Our first activity was trying to lift a hula hoop all on the same level.
Here is Orlan trying to help the kids figure out how to keep the hoop level.

Helping each other! So awesome.

We can do this!

Yayy! They got it together :)

Fanny showing how it's done.

 

Our next activity was trying to all walk together in a small circle.
They did really well with this one.

Our next activity was "lift a person only using your index fingers". You may know it as "light as a feather, stiff as a board." If you have tried this before, the goal is to all chant "ight as a feather stiff as a board" together to become one unit. As these kids are Deaf, it was definitely an interesting twist and was extremely challenging for them!

Leo was not excited to be lifted.. hahah.

Genesis being lifted!

Fanny was sure to care for her head. We had to try again because Genesis could not keep her body straight. Practice made perfect! The next time they were finally able to lift Genesis with just their index fingers, with no cheating!! It took a lot of trying and experimenting, and thinking it was not possible, but when they were finally able to lift her, they were so excited and surprised! I am so proud of them all for their hard work and success!

 

 

 

 

Thanks so much for reading!

Hope you are living life to its fullest in His name!