PLEASE PRAY

Please pray for our friends, Nate and Natalie Klauser, who are experiencing the most gut-wrenching situation:

"Please pray for our family! We received a phone call yesterday saying that Caleb's birth mom wants him back after being with us for two months. We have 48 hours left with our son and our hearts are hurting."

You can read more on their blog.

Acquiring English

I'm thankful for how God has equipped his church with people who have many different gifts and talents and are willing to share them with those of us adopting. There are several people at our church who teach ESL (English as a Second Language) and one of them passed on several great resources for me. Perhaps the most helpful was this article with many great tips on how to help older kids who are adopted acquire English during the first few months and years. Even if you are adopting younger kids, I think many of the tips could be helpful.

P.S. Our kids will only know French when they arrive!

English Acquisition for Internationally Adopted Children

Apr 12, 2001 - © Susan Ward

When adopting an older child internationally, some of the main questions revolve around language. How will we communicate? How quickly will she learn English? Below are tips and notes based on my experience with Hannah. Hannah had just turned six when she got home from Russia.

Hannah was a bit of a wonder child in that she was completely fluent with almost no accent after 9 months. Part of the reason is that she is very, very bright; she has an excellent memory; and most importantly, she had excellent Russian language skills which provided the foundation for her to learn her second language. She was also very eager to learn English.

Hannah's mastery of English was very quick. After three years home, she reads above grade level, writes poetry, and understands very subtle nuances of the language. Her language abilities quite remarkable and are probably not typical.

General language tips: -learn as much Russian (Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.) as you can and use it for the basics i.e."It's time for bed." "Do you need to go to the toilet?" "Come here" "Would you like an apple?" "I love you" "You're my daughter."

-When speaking Russian doesn't work, draw pictures and pantomime.

-When you're not communicating in Russian, speak English to your child constantly even when they don't understand it. For example, when you're going for a walk, just chat in English about what you see.

-Start reading as soon as your child is home and read every day

-Teach a game where they have to use English like "Go Fish" (I taught Hannah this on day 2)

-Resist asking them to repeat things for you in English, they'll do it when they're ready

-When they start to speak English, instead of correcting them, repeat it back correctly. For example if Hannah aid, "Yesterday I eat ice cream," I would say, "You ate ice cream yesterday?"

-Early on, get one of the phonics games. It helps them learn the alphabet as well as sounds

-Make language fun--after Hannah learned her alphabet, we did lots of verbal alphabet games

-As Hannah's English began to take off, my rule was I only corrected one thing per day

-Get a translator/tutor. I had a Russian graduate student who spent a couple hours with Hannah each week for a couple months. They were speaking Russian, but Olga was also teaching Hannah basic English i.e. vocabulary, numbers, a few letters, etc. I also used Olga to translate the "big" issues i.e. safety topics, upcoming Christmas, the aunt she was about to meet who was pregnant, etc.

Watching an older child begin to comprehend then to speak English is one of the many miracles of older child international adoption!

The copyright of the article English Acquisition for Internationally Adopted Childrenin Adoptive Parenting is owned by Susan Ward. Permission to republish English Acquisition for Internationally Adopted Children in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Domestic Adoption Resource

I want to share with you a great organization doing domestic adoptions in case anyone is interested. If we were wanting to adopt a newborn baby domestically, this is probably the "agency" we would use. Although Christian Adoption Consultants is not an agency. Tracie Loux is a consultant who works with many different adoption agencies (often in states that have good adoption laws, meaning less waiting time to terminate parental rights). This allows the adoption process to go pretty quickly.

You can subscribe to her blog and receive their current available situations (I posted the most recent below). Every time I get these, it makes me want to adopt one of these babies!! Clearly, that is not happening anytime in the near future.

You can also email her and she will send you more information about how the process works.

Updated Available Situations

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

by tracieloux

AA, Gender Unknown, Due March 15th (UT), 17K plus medical (5-7K)

AA, Gender Unknown, Due March 23rd (OH), 17K plus legals of 6K

AA, Gender Unknown, Due April 6th (UT), 17K plus medical (5-7K)

AA, Boy, Due April 6th (UT), 17K plus medical (5-7K)

CC, Boy, Due March 1st, 30.5K plus medical

CC, Boy, due late Feb, 37.5K

These situations are representative of the situation available to our clients from the agencies we work with. This is a partial list and changes frequently.

If you have any further questions please feel free to email me at tracie@christianadoptionconsultants.com