ESL

Jon, my first grader, has been in ESL (English as a Second Language) for two and a half years now, and has received speech therapy for a year and a half. He has some obvious problems with his speech, but has come a long way. I sometimes forget that he has vocabulary retention issues too. Today I made the boys hot chocolate. They haven't had hot chocolate in a while. Jon asked for mushrooms. I said, "mushrooms?!" He said, "yes. They're rectangles. They're white." He meant marshmallows. From the very beginning he has been resourceful with getting his message across. He is a very, very clever boy, and I expect great and wonderful things for him. He is strong in math, but he lags behind in reading. He is lagging so far behind that I worry a bit that they are going to ask us to hold him back. He has some memory problems with words, but can remember other things down to the most minute detail. I think that Jon, like many boys, would always have been slow in verbal anyway, but coming to a new country at age four and having to start all over again probably didn't help. He is going to catch up eventually, and when he does, I think he is going to be a very strong communicator. He has had to be inventive and creative with communication, and it's going to help him someday. I just took this picture of Jon working on his Valentine's Day cards. He looks younger than a six year old here. He's like a model. He can look different in every picture.