Our family is very verbal, especially my husband and our oldest daughter. They love to talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Which is great. I love it. Words and communication are an essential part of life for someone aspiring to write well.
Our youngest daughter loves to talk too. However, speech has been a big challenge for her. My youngest has a moderate/severe hearing loss. Her loss inhibits her ability to hear certain speech tones such as "s", "sh", hard sounds like "k", and the endings of words. This combined with the fact that her hearing loss went unaided until she was almost three (we adopted her at age 2 1/2) and English is her second language, she has had some significant obstacles to overcome with speech. That being said, she has made monumental strides and with a lot of hard work and the assistance of a kick ass speech therapist she is pretty much on target for a child of her age with both receptive and expressive language. Our biggest challenge now is teaching her the speech sounds that are missing from her repertoire.
Tonight while doing some "home work", for the heck of it I pulled out the flash cards of words ending in the "s" sound ... house, mouse, dice, kiss (we had put these away a few months ago because she simply couldn't produce the sound). Well I almost fell off my chair!
me: What's this? (while showing my baby a picture of Mickey Mouse)
R: mouSe!
I thought it must be a fluke so I tried again.
me: What's this? (displaying a picture of a school bus)
R: (jumping up and down excitedly) buS! I wan to ride on a hool buS!
We all jumped up and down excitedly. Then we did the only thing we could do. Celebrate with banana splits.
8 comments:
Awesome!!! Yeah for "S" and banana splits!
There was one little exception to little Ju Jube not being able to say "sh" sounds....I will never forget the day on the phone she said "Hi Aunt Shari" Made my heart melt.
Yes, even if a child can say the sound with prompting, it takes a lot of repetition (hearing it esp.) to incorporate that sound into spontanteous speech. One of Ran's teachers from the school for the deaf also said it helps a lot motivationally if the word is meaningful to the child. : )
Awe...I guess Auntie Shari is meaningful to little Ran :)
Yay for you sweet little girl, Tracey! It sounds like she was just as excited to be able to finally say the "s". And yay for banana splits! The best way to celebrate, if you ask me!
Very cute. Buy her something extra for Christmas.
What is going on here?! I keep returning to find I have not yet commented. But I was sure I did!
Ya. It's a sign of age no doubt.
Sigh.
You know I'm rooting for Ran all the way she has a soul sister here on the other side of the country.
xo
Post a Comment