Monday, September 29, 2008

Working on Receptive Language


Nolan's expressive language is coming along swimmingly, but everyone has noticed an obvious lag in his receptive language. This is definitely new territory for me, since my speech-delayed child always had above average receptive language. While Nolan understands most of what he says (doggie being the exception- he can say it but might bring you a truck if you ask for one), he is far below the average 50-100 words that most 1 year olds understand. The word "mama" even eludes him- a "where is mama" yields a blank stare or a confused looking about for a random toy.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty that we don't live in an area with dedicated oral-deaf schools or even licensed auditory-verbal therapists, but I can't dwell on what isn't. So our solution is to increase the amount that we talk and read to him. Its really time to get working on those experience books!

I found a yahoo group called learn2hear and have been stealing language exercises from the wonderful parents there. The current theme is autumn, so in addition to our speech therapy goals (working on "in" and "out"), we are working on the following words:

Acorn, leaf, tree, colors, falling, spider, fog, frost, turkey, apple, spider web, pumpkin, squirrel.

I've adapted the words from the list on learn2hear for Nolan's age (photosynthesis is a bit beyond him at this point), so hopefully he'll pick up a few of them!

5 comments:

tammy said...

You amaze me Leah! Nolan & Matt are so lucky to have you for their mom! You do such a wonderful job with them and I love your lesson ideas! I've just discovered the learn2hear site too and am loving it!

I'm loving the leaves in this picture! I can't believe they're changing already! Down here in TX, I sat and watched my oldest son's football game and by the time it was done, I felt like I had just taken a shower!!! UGH! I'm so ready for the fall!

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Yea, Leah, you are doing great :0)

Kel said...

That is an absolutely gorgeous picture.

And I want to join in saying you are doing an incredible job! You are so in tune to your kids' needs, and doing amazing work with them. I can't imagine tackling a hearing loss and oralism without the support we have from our school. You rock!

Ambulance Mommy said...

I just want to echo what the other moms said :)

You should be so proud of yourself for really being an advocate for your boys!

I'm going to check out the website you were talking about from yahoo!

Thanks, and sending hugs! :)

Here It Comes said...

Somewhere I have saved all of Emmi's lesson plans that the school district provided us when she had an AI teacher come to the house before she was old enough to be in PPCD. I should dig those out and, and get you copies. In fact, I think I will work on getting those posted on Emmi's blog in case anyone wants them. We have been really lucky to have a great school ditrict that has a very strong deaf ed program. Although, I guess it wasn't really luck. I moved from another city to get into this school district. The luck part was that is just happened to be the same area in which I grew up!