Learning Language

I remember sitting and watching one of Miss Kat's speech sessions just after her implant. She was working on discriminating between two fairly different sounding words. Then the therapist read a story that targeted one of the words. I saw that while she was gaining vocabulary, the therapist was having to teach one word at a time. In that moment, I was struck with the pure impossibility of teaching a child every word in the English language individually. It was an task that surely no one could do. There just simply wasn't enough time.

I was absolutely right, but I was also wrong. It is impossible to individually teach every word through therapy. But, I was missed was that because of her CIs, Miss Kat would NOT need to learn them that way. She would eventually be able to pick up language through context, brief explanations, conversation and reading. When these skills fell into place, her language exploded.

Update from the Mainstream

Miss Kat has officially been in her neighborhood school with supports for a full quarter. She is doing AMAZING! She has friends, she enjoys school, and her academics skills are really rising. Right now she has all A's except for one B (in Comm. Arts). We also heard from her reading teacher and they did her first Lexcile test. The mid-range for a 6th grader in the middle of the year is 800. Miss Kat is already at 879! While this transition has been a lot of work, and we were very worried, she is showing us what a star she is!!

5 years bilateral

This week was Miss Kat's 5 year anniversary of being bilateral. We had some brownies and retold the story of her second activation. I asked her what it sounded like when she was only wearing one ear, if they sounded any different? (She did have 18 months between them.) She described only that it was like the sound was being "sucked out" of that side of her head. I thought that was a very interesting description. Her ears have similar word discrimination scores and she really doesn't have a preference if one dies, so neither is really "stronger". I was just curious if she could hear a quality difference. Guess not.