8th May 2015
Wow, what a day, I am exhausted but very satisfied.
Today, I attended a seminar in Dublin, hosted by Our New Ears/Deaf Hear, facilitated by Carol Flexer, American Audiologist & AV therapist. What an inspirational and knowledgable woman, I feel very privileged to have met her and got a glimpse of her wonderful expertise.
The day was about helping our children to develop their auditory brains & there was so much information, I can barely do it justice, but I will give you a little flavour to wet your appetites.
Carol's opening statement was to ensure that we knew how we hear, now most people think we hear with our ears, but we don't - we hear with our brain. Our ears are simply a portal for getting auditory information into our brains, much as our eyes are a portal for visual information or our noses for smells. She emphasised that although our brains contact a huge amount of auditory tissue, it will only be develop if activated by sound and so early diagnosis and provision of appropriate hearing technology is of upmost importance. In fact, she said that hearing loss is a neurobiological emergency!
To remind us all how important using hearing technology is, she stressed that "what goes in is what comes out" so we need to put in high quality, intelligible sound, in order to get high quality, intelligible sound out. Our brains are programmed to receive information 24/7, that is why we don't have "ear lids" but yet we do have eyelids, thus reinforcing the importance of auditory input. But of course, we know the importance of hearing, we need to know how to maximise the information we are putting in there.
She gave some advice on growing our child's brains:
* talk constantly about what you are doing and thinking (increases knowledge of vocabulary and thought processes)
* create experiences and then discuss them
* use complex language, explain it and then link it to experiences
* read at least daily, some text that is above the child's linguistic level
* play board games
* sing, dance, use musical instruments
* avoid performance based activities eg questions, try making statements and allow the child to respond if they want
Tips for Talking included:
* talk lots
* talk about your thoughts (help your child understand why you are sad, cross, happy)
* include prepositions to increase grammatical structure
* talk in full sentences
* discuss sequences and what happens if the sequence if s performed differently
ALWAYS SPEAK SLOWLY & CLEARLY - clear speech can improve the listeners speech discrimination by up to 40%, whilst slowing down allows thinking & processing time.
Remember that although early diagnosis is a wonderful gift and can enable our children to reach age-appropriate speech and language by 4-5 years old, but if we don't continue to practice, they will remain static or even backtrack in their progress. Our children will need to do pre-reading before class and be intentionally taught new vocabulary & grammatical rules as, no matter how well the technology works, they will never be able to "overhear" all of the auditory information that a hearing child would. Continuous input is vital to continue growing the child's brain, just like a professional sportsperson still continues to practice hard to stay on top of their game.
I am so excited to have received so much valuable information today and look forward to using some
of Carol's tips with my daughter and son, then seeing the affects it has in the future.
Thanks for reading,
Goodnight,
Sara xx
No comments:
Post a Comment