This past week was the first week of preschool. My student that underwent cochlear implant surgery over the summer was activated just two weeks before school started. I was only able to have two sessions as the student missed a day of school for an audiological follow-up appointment.
At both sessions we began by working on Ling sound detection and discrimination. My student definitely appeared to detect all of the vowel sounds (oo, ah, ee) as well as "mm". Each time I produced one of these sounds behind the acoustic hoop my student would vocalize a neutral vowel, most similar to "ah". I needed to add the visual of my mouth for my student to produce a closer approximation of the target sound. I did not see any real indication that my student detected "sh" or "ss" at this time. For all of the sounds, it was not until I showed the picture and added sign language that my student appeared to comprehend and make a meaningful connection.
Before implantation, this student and I had built a routine using the Animal Clinic toy with doors/keys that I blogged about in an earlier post. Over and over for each door, we use the same words/signs (key please, blue key, turn-turn-turn, open, out, bye-bye, in). I used that toy this week, so that we can start mapping sound onto the routine. This will allow us to start working on discriminating between words that differ by syllable number (out vs. open vs. turn-turn-turn) as well as long and short sounds (ooooo-pen vs. bye-bye).
We have a lot of new students in the preschool and kindergarten this year. With the help of our fabulous paraprofessionals, I was able to get a close-up picture of each students' face. They are printed and laminated and I have two sets. Using the mailbox toy that I blogged about in a prior post, my recently implanted student and myself labeled and "mailed" all the pictures. I modeled their spoken names and also their sign names. At this point my student only copied the signing and did some vocalizing. As these new friends and their names become more familiar, we can start to use them in listening-based activities. Unfortunately, I've come to the realization that in the whole group of 12 students, only one student has a one-syllable name :(
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