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.

Spontaneous Language at Summer School

Miss Kat is away for vacation right now, but I got her ESY end of term report in the mail today. It had a list of some spontaneous language that I just had to share.

"She was searching my ancestors." (During a class lesson of family history.)

"I want to talk about dinosaurs." (This whole summer has been about Jurassic World!)

"Like, I made a joke about it, like maybe he (t-rex) used his arms for sign language."

"What kind of dinosaur is the 'kongamato', so I can look for it in my books, because I can bring it to school." (She also believes in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.)

"On Friday I was going to swim all day, but I found out I was really busy." (She would swim all day, every day if we let her.)

"I had millions of questions, but it was all blank."

"I don't think there won't be any mean people there."

And my personal favorite:

"I sound like my own mother!"

Fully Implantable by AB?

It looks like Advanced Bionics was granted a patent for a fully implantable CI system today. I am not much of a science gal, but I am going to look it over. For other curious folks, here is the link. I wonder how long it takes for a device like this to go from planning to actual human subjects? Right now, Miss Kat is not remotely interested in a fully implantable system (and I am not interested in her being part of the first generation to use a new technology) but perhaps in the future...

Sitting and watching Kat take the CELF

She is truly amazing to me. The words she knows really blows my mind. She has done so well. All I can say is wow.

And now we have the IEP

While the meeting didn't go perfectly, and I may have offended the heck out of some professionals (not on purpose, but I think it happened nonetheless) we did manage to get every single thing we wanted! Miss Kat will be attending her neighborhood middle school this fall!

So, we ended up with five goals for the Teacher of the Deaf, who will be seeing Miss Kat every day for a full class period. She has an auditory goal, a non-fiction reading comprehension goal, a vocabulary goal (understanding and using content vocabulary), a written expression goal, and an expressive language goal. These goals are well crafted and I think they will absolutely help Miss Kat progress in the right way.

The thing that was far more sticky was Miss Kat and math. She is actually much further behind in math than any other area (partly because of her struggles with memory and partly because she just hasn't had the opportunity for really great instruction). Well, her school did not have a placement that was appropriate for Miss Kat in math. So, the school decided to pair her with a special education teacher and have math all by herself! We were stunned! She now has a tremendously high number of special education minutes because she has math every day and it is SPED minutes. So, she also has two math goals.

Her accommodations were everything we could ask for as well. Here is our list:

• Home set of textbooks
• Preferential Seating
• Teacher Provided Notes
• Extended Time for Tests
• Test Read to Student (if desired)
• Alternative Setting for Test (if desired)
• Check Often for Understanding/Review (I have an interesting plan for this one!)
• Closed Captioning for all media when available: if unavailable, student is to be given a script or written preview of information to be covered. If script is not available, student is to receive no penalty to grade. (I really like the way this is written!)
• Written directions paired with all assignments given in class

Miss Kat's IEP is set and it looks great! We had our first "Meet the Teacher Night" just two days after the IEP! The school is so supportive and we love how involved everyone is! Miss Kat will be visiting again two more times this year (with the other rising 6th graders) and we are all looking forward to a great year!