In January little dwellers of Child’s Home in the village of Kalinovka, like all children in Ukraine, were still enjoying the holiday season and, thus, receiving gifts. The Dimex and Mirax companies kindly donated 700 hryvnyas (approximately 85 US dollars) as well as generously provided the children with almost 20 kilos of beads! This great source of beads will definitely keep little handcrafters happily busy for at least half the year! This means we will surely see many more wonderful trees made of beads from the special handcrafters of the Child’s Home.

The children were also happy to receive a Naval Clash game and a little musical keyboard from Pavel and Juriy from Zaporizhzhia.

On the 19th of January some volunteers from the town of Energodar came to visit the children in Kalinovka. This time the volunteers came with their parents. In the near future they plan to start massage courses in their town and from time to time visit children in Kalinovka who really need some rehabilitation.

Our masseur-volunteer Natasha also visited the children in Kalinovka. We hope that she will assist us in training a local specialist who’ll be able to help children take their regular rehabilitation courses.

Last month we published the article “Help Special Children Save Their Mother!” where we asked for your support of our fund-raising campaign to maintain educator staff salaries in Chernigov Child’s Home. Unfortunately, we still can only partially cover the salary cost of some educators, and are struggling to find money for the rest so the children with special needs will not be deprived of a warm care. Thanks to Maya’s Hope organization’s donation of 1,145 US dollars from the U.S. and Sergey's donation of 1,000 hryvnyas from Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine) (approximately 122 US dollars), the educators in Kalinovka received their January salary.

In January we published two profile-stories of little orphans from the Child’s Home in Kalinovka and two more profiles appeared on the reecesrainbow.org website of international adoption. We truly hope that some of these children will soon find loving families.

The reconstruction works on the Happy Home-2 are suspended till spring. Some parts of the reconstruction project are likely to be changed, so we’re thoroughly studying some details to make this new building safe enough for its future little dwellers. We still need your great support with our project of Happy-Home-2 social adaptation group!

Our volunteer Sergey and his wife visited Kalinovka and brought the children a box of bananas, mandarins and oranges that were distributed around to both little and big residents of the Child’s Home.

The educators’ achievements:

Natalia P. practiced four colours and arithmetic with numbers up to 5 with Larisa K. Yulia L. can now repeat phrases after her educator, caretaker and doctors; she has learnt to call children by name. Natalia P. helps Bogdan Sch. do some physical exercises that will enable him to walk independently in the future.

Sophia Sh. taught the children from the first Happy Home adaptation group to write letters by means of some spelling copy books. Children drew cars and animals in separate squares of their books. Sophia Sh. also made some plasticine and CD handicrafts with the children.

Valentina K. also told children from the same group about the Baptism of Jesus Christ holiday. The educator involved the children in making a snowman and a cardboard feeding rack for birds.

Little Varya from the group of Olga M. can play with the ball well. Igor Sh. can kick the ball with his leg and learns to walk.

Raisa G. was making some plasticine cutouts with Dima S., but she says it is rather dangerous to do the same activities with the rest of her group of children since they try to eat the plasticine.

The list of the current needs of the Chernigov Child’s Home in Kalinovka (5th of February 2013):

1. The construction materials for the Happy Home-2 social adaptation group

2. Plaster for figure modeling

3. The 4mm wire

4. Acrylic colours

5. Checkers

6. DVD disks with cartoons

7. Manipulative materials

8. Sticky tapes

9. Big and middle sized puzzles

10. Flower nets

11. Flower pot stands

12. Musical toys

13. Rubber and plastic toys

14. DVD player

15. Canvas on beads embroidery

16. DVD disks for recording

17. Vitamins for children and adults

18. Water filter

19. Embroidery set (colourful threads, linens or linens with pictures)

20. Toy construction sets

21. Toy blocks

22. Toy pyramidions

23. Mathematics learning copy books – 8 pieces

We’re grateful to everyone who has supported the Chernigov Child’s Home in Kalinovka and we ask you for your further kind support of special children, who like no one else, need our care!

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