About Me

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I am just a mom: a mom of three kids and one of them is hearing impaired. We are a busy family and I am a very busy mom. I want my hearing impaired daughter, Brooke, to have every advantage so I try to incorporate as many lessons and strategies into our every day life. Most of the teaching I do with Brooke is incorporated into our daily routines and parent-directed play. This blog will include some of our formal lessons but mostly it will be learning to listen in the everyday.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Auditory Memory

This week Brooke and I are working on auditory memory. Auditory memory is the ability to remember words, numbers, phrases that you hear. Using the game Cariboo as an incentive, I gave Brooke a series of random words for her to listen and repeat.

This is how we do it:
1. I will give Brooke 4 words that she knows such as elephant, umbrella, hat, shoe. Once she repeats them to me in the correct order, she can pick a card and use the key to open the door in the game.
2. We started with 5 words (which I thought she could do) but she was really struggling with it. Since I want her to feel successful, I dropped down to 4 words.

3. Here are a few other lists:


football, tree, orange, ice cream


bee, truck, boat, soccer


rainbow, sun, mailman, fox


book, flower, duck, apple


4. You can play this with any game you like. Before your child's turn, just ask her to repeat a list of words.



Thursday, August 11, 2011

Listening and Coloring



I printed a coloring sheet from the 4-H cloverbuds activity I gave Brooke some directions with 3-4 critical elements for coloring the sheet such as:

1. Color the man's hat red. (Brooke started to color the boy's hat so I had to stop her and we talked about the man and the boy)

2. Color the boy's hat yellow

3. Color the canoe green with orange polka dots. (Brooke needed help with "What is a canoe?"

4. Color the car's headlights yellow

5. Color the pool toy on the top of the pile purple.

6. Make a little smoke coming out of the back of the car (I didn't think she would get this one but she pleasantly surprised me)

7. Write your name on the top of the page

8. Draw a sun in the top corner of the page

9. Color the car your favorite color and color the tires black (She did the tires first and then made the car a rainbow of colors)

10. Draw a smiley face on the front door of the car (She asked "What is a front door?" and then drew the smiley face)




Since she didn't like my color choices very much, we printed another copy and she told me how to color it. From memory, she had me color the same things but I noticed some vocabulary words what we need to work on:

1. She called the man a "boy"
2. She didn't know the name of the door handle but was able to describe that we "push it to get into the car"
3. She called the headlights, "lights"
4. She called the tires, "wheels"
5. The woman was a "girl"
6. She didn't know the name of the "fender"
7. She called the canoe a "boat"

So, we will work on some "car parts" as vocabulary this week! I learned a lot about her sentences and vocabulary from this activity. Her best direction was: "Color the boat brown with blue polkadots" which is 4 critical elements - I was impressed