One thing that our AV therapist always drilled into us was the importance of pre-teaching material to deaf children. If Noah is spending all of his day trying to figure out what was said, he's not going to have much time left for learning. If we introduce important vocabulary or concepts in advance it puts him on a more level playing field with the rest of the class.
As Noah gets older I imagine that pre-teaching will be boring and tedious, but in kindergarten it's lots of fun. It's apple week at Noah's school so we decided to take a pre-teaching field trip to a local orchard. We came home with a half-bushel of fresh picked apples and a boy tired enough to go right to bed. Noah came home with lots of new vocabulary (and a few new bruises, but at least he didn't fall down the mountain!). All in all it was a great trip.
3 comments:
Those apples look pretty big! What a great trip- just think of when you get to pre-teach chemistry! That ought to be a lot of fun...
Pre-teaching makes so much sense, although it hadn't really occurred to me before JTC. Now that X is in the oral deaf preschool here, we'll be doing more of it. Next week, we're attending a special curriculum meeting with the teacher, so I suspect we'll come away with lots of "homework"!!! Pre-teaching is fun when you can discover fun ways to engage your kid in topics, such as a trip to the apple orchard. Sounds like so much fun!
I hope that Noah is doing well in school!
Great post. I'd take it even one step further: pre-teaching is a great strategy whenever you deal with a kid who has any kind of auditory problem, not just in terms of deafness, but also autditory processing disorder. Hallie is a visual learner who long appeared not to hear stuff (we had her hearing tested a whole bunch of times as a result of this since she never responded to our voices on a consistent basis, which turns out to be one of the signs of autism). So whenever possible, we try to pre-teach, too, and also reinforce some of the lessons she learns at school at home. I try to make sure we own the same books, are on the same page. Right now she's in a preschool that's cooperative with us on this, but once she starts Kindergarten, I want this written into her IEP (that teachers need to share the lessons with us in advance so we know what is going on and can pre-teach).
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