Tag Archives: Parents

Parents’ Sign Language Proficiency

When a child is born, his brain is a wondrous organ, primed to learn language and make sense of the world.  Hearing or deaf, children are born with an auditory cortex and language centers in the brain.  They are sponges, soaking up experiences and language input.

Grammatical Morphemes: Precious, Fleeting, and Oh-So-Important

Morphemes are the smallest units of speech capable of conveying meaning.  Words like “dog” and “bark” are “free” morphemes, because they stand alone and have meaning.  Grammatical morphemes are tiny markers that can be added to these words to add to or change their meaning.  They are “bound” morphemes because they don’t work on theirContinue reading “Grammatical Morphemes: Precious, Fleeting, and Oh-So-Important”

Spice Up Your IEPs with SALSAS

Writing goals for a child’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) can be stressful.  This document, which is legally binding, spells out the child’s goals for the year.  While it can be changed and altered as needed, the process of doing so can be time-consuming and difficult.  How can you make sure you’ve written a comprehensive, appropriateContinue reading “Spice Up Your IEPs with SALSAS”

Books for Shared Reading: Choosing Them, Changing Them

Sharing books with your child is one of the best activities you can choose for growing pre-literacy, speech, language, listening, and social skills.   By carefully choosing books, and changing them to fit your needs, you can enhance the language and listening opportunities and help have a more successful interaction with your child or student(s).

Don’t Be Too Good of a Listener

As parents and professionals who work with children with hearing loss, we become expert listeners and communication decoders.  That endless string of syllables?  We can interpret that!  That mosh of real words and unintelligible phonemes?  No problem, we’ve got it covered.  With our familiar ears, we often know what our children want to say, evenContinue reading “Don’t Be Too Good of a Listener”

You’re Not Getting Paid By the Word: Hanen Program Presentation

On Friday, October 8, 2010, I attended a presentation called “Parent/Caregiver-Implemented Interactive Language Intervention: Introduction to the Hanen Approach” by Toby Stephan, M.A., CCC-SLP. The presentation described the Hanen Program, a Canadian intervention designed to help parents of children with global language delays.  The program, similar to a Listening and Spoken Language approach, acknowledges that parents are theirContinue reading “You’re Not Getting Paid By the Word: Hanen Program Presentation”