What Is School Like For Kids With Hearing Loss?
Charlotte before her Kindergarten field day her teacher, Ms. Showalter-Cupp, and two friends, Fletcher and Lucy!
Super fun guest Maybeury Field Day guest helpers, Charlotte’s big brother, Ollie - left, and cousin Alec, right.
Charlotte’s kindergarten year...
How could she already be done with it?! WOW. One second she was wearing diapers and the next thing I know she’s telling me she has a boyfriend named Juan. (She even pronounced it with the proper ‘J’ Spanish sound, “Wan,” which made my Tex-Mex loving heart glow with joy!)
Getting mentally prepared for elementary school is a big step for all parents. Tack on a child with special needs, and it’s extra big. There are so many things you’re trying to prepare for and be ready to help them with, but not wanting to hover or be unwilling to let them fail in order to ultimately grow. (Yes, mentally exhausting for parents!)
Mentally Preparing
Our Auditory Verbal Therapists (we work with one through our county school system and one in a private practice connected with our audiology group), had explained to me since Charlotte started preschool that Char would ALWAYS have to work harder in class than her peers.
Her first priority of work is to actively listen.
Her secondary work priority is to comprehend and learn.
As naturally hearing people, we rarely even consider listening. We only even pay hearing any attention when we CAN’T hear someone say something, for one reason or another.
Now imagine that’s your normal state. You hear nothing all the time, but then someone turns up the volume somehow, and you’re trying to discern the “important thing to listen to” through all sorts of other background noises you aren’t used to having in your head.
Listening is the very first thing you have to teach a deaf child that uses technology to hear and speak. The technique we began with was “Learning To Listen” sounds. We started practicing with Charlotte upon getting our first hearing aids and Auditory Verbal Speech Therapy sessions at 8 months old. (Check out a video on this blog post when Char said her first one!)
“A Doggy said Woof Woof. A cow says Moo Moo. Quack Quack says the duck.”
Sure - in some ways it’s not different from teaching hearing kids their animal sounds and to pay attention and repeat mom or dad. But in actuality it’s really different.
The biggest difference is the lack of “incidental learning” or learning by accident. Deaf kids just don’t pick up all the surrounding stuff like hearing kids.
The Director of Audiology and Co-Director of the Cochlear Implant Program at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Healthcare System, Dr. Christine Eubanks, whom I’ve gotten to know well not only through Charlotte being a patient of their department, but through the legislative work I’ve been involved with, recently shared with me an article by Lori A. Pakulski, PhD, CCC-A, titled, “Closing the Achievement Gap for Children With Hearing Loss.” This article calls out the importance of audiologists and SLPs (speech and language pathologists) working together to ensure the academic success of kids with hearing loss.
“For students with hearing loss, a visual language such as American Sign Language (ASL) provides a seamless avenue for incidental learning when parents are also competent ASL users. When families choose a listening and spoken language approach over ASL, they need to work to provide full auditory access for the child for maximal language experience. In other words, auditory stimulation is essential in the development and maturation of the auditory brain, a precondition for the normal development of spoken language skills. Initially, this can be a big challenge.”
Building an experienced, knowledgeable, and aligned team to support our deaf and hard of hearing children is THE KEY to success.
But this key to helping our kids with hearing loss is not a “thing.” The key to success is a mental toolset we have with us at all time and can share with the rest of our family, our kids’ teachers - school and extracurricular, their peers and peers’ parents — anyone our kids needs to interact with in their life. And then we can ALL USE these tools every single day to encourage, support and help our kids learn to be the amazing humans they are supposed to be.
Knowledge Is Power
Our Learning Personal Path
With all the legislative working I have been doing, my exposure to the Deaf community using American Sign Language (ASL) has grown. There is no question I believe that if a whole family is actively using and fluent in ASL, a child’s language acquisition can thrive. But that language is still ASL and of the approximately 2 million deaf and hard of hearing people in America, less than 500,000 use ASL to communicate (source).
Thus, as a hearing and speaking parent of a deaf child, my energy and effort is not going to be placed around teaching the rest of my family and my deaf child a language none of us know and very few people know in general use to communicate, but instead doing everything I can to help her develop her brain to learn to listen and ultimately learn to communicate and connect with her hearing and speaking peers. Then, if she decides to be bilingual or multi-lingual one year, she can learn ASL, Spanish, French, German or ANY other language she might desire!!
So how do I worked to provide maximum auditory stimulation for Charlotte?
I talk a lot. I correct her words constantly. And I keep her actively engaging with language models (aka friends and family who naturally speak with and create curiosity with her).
Guess who lost her first tooth in Kindergarten?! No matter what we are doing, I'm always working with Charlotte on her pronunciation and grammar. Our family used to be the only one who could understand her, but these days she gets complimented on having better speech than many hearing kindergarteners.
** P.S. We have started a new tooth fairy tradition at our home and instead of money we give magic... Everyone needs to Hold The Magic for their kids to grow their creative muscles - storytelling is magic!
Just a little note to remember extra patience is needed always with kids and especially with special needs kids. Sometimes these days we actually forget Charlotte is deaf. She has learned to listen so well that I rarely do anything special for her when at home. But we are just finishing our cochlear implant upgrade process and have a new bluetooth connecting hearing aid that hopefully will make her upcoming first grade year that much more successful!
Final Thoughts On What School Has Been Like For Charlotte
Growing Friendships
SO MUCH FUN! There is no question this year was a MAJOR year for Char. Starting with the fact that this was the first full year everyone could understand everything she said. Listening to that loose tooth video above, it seems impossible that she was ever hard to understand - but she was. Since she was a year delayed in listening to the world around her (based on when she got her hearing aid and Cochlear Implant), she spent preschool linguistically behind her peers. It was especially evident with the other girls in her preschool class who had all been able to communicate much easier with one another.
In preschool, Charlotte spent a lot of time in parallel play, but not as much time living in the same imaginative world as a classmate. That began to shift in preK, as we focused more and more on her articulation, because she was catching up on language acquisition, but having trouble clearly communicating.
As opposed to this year in Kindergarten when she was making friendships left and right with the most well-spoken girls in her class. WOOHOO! I was floored to watch her social skills and relationships bloom and grow this year.
With Char being one of four busy kids, playdates over the years were hard because I really needed to be there to help her communicate clearly. But this year, she didn’t need me any more. She could go to people’s house and have them over to ours, just like any other hearing child. My heart beams with the confidence and joy this brought her.
Working With Teachers - Do IT!
I tried to work very close with Charlotte’s teachers. I had pitched bringing a program into Maybeury and gotten approval. It’s called Visual Phonics and was instrumental in Charlotte’s articulation development. Her kindergarten teacher had raised her hand in eagerness to learn and teach Charlotte, when the Principal shared this program with his staff. She was gracious and open to making herself available over the summer, and we got together several times before school started to work together with another amazing speech and language pathologist who specialized in deaf and hard of hearing services, Cheryl Sale. Cheryl is a certified Visual Phonics instructor with whom I had taken several day-long VP classes from over the past few years to support Charlotte at home.
We familiarized her kindergarten teacher with how Char and I were using Visual Phonics. As well as how her amazing PreK teacher at All Saints Preschool, Debbie Brown, had been the first to integrate VP into Char’s class on my request. Debbie, who’s been teacher preschool for over 20 years, was blown away at what she saw happening in her class with children understanding letter sounds. I used Debbie’s learnings to pitch the idea to Maybeury Elementary’s principal during an EIP meeting for Char!
I also had Ann Hughes from the Department of Disabilities come in August before school started to lead an all-day program, free of charge for any teacher at Maybeury who was interested in learning. We had 8 teachers attend. It was awesome!
IEP Services
During the school year, every Tuesday and Thursday before school, the progress and tactics used for that day’s speech session would be shared with me, her kindergarten teacher and our AVT at VCU Audiology. This constant connection gave each person ideas and tactical things to continue in their time with Charlotte. (Thank you so much, Sharon!!!)
It was also this communication stream which allowed for her Kindergarten teacher to express concern about Charlotte’s reading. She was a wiz at sight words, but sounding out even two syllable words was a challenge There was just odd gaps between her hearing sounds and being able to create the sound when seeing it visually. And math… math was just something I hadn’t been focused on yet, so it was a place of concern, too.
This led to us requesting an EIP evaluation for additional services in May. Char had only qualified for Speech to better her articulation and not any Deaf or Hard Of Hearing services. (Don’t even get me started on this - will save for another dedicated post). BUT when reevaluated, it was found she was at the very bottom of the “average” group or under in several segments, and we were able to engage a new d/hh specialist to work with her twice a week on reading, in specific, which of course seemed to help math conceptually, too!
**Note: I am a HUGE believer on going heavy and hard early for any and every service you can get your hands on for your child. Young kids have so much bandwidth for learning and adapting. And later they begin to register that what they may be doing may not be what their peers are doing, causing the urge to resist. I was ALL in for getting Char more of ANYTHING that could set her up for success later, whatever I needed to do to get it for her!!
These new services kicked off immediately upon approval by the school district, and Char truly started to soar her final 6 weeks of Kindergarten. When we went to see our private AVT at VCU, Avery, in July, Charlotte knocked our socks off when she sat at the work table and opened an envelop with her name on it that was a ‘thank you note’ from Avery.
She pulled that card out and read every word all by herself! Our jaws dropped.
Technology In School
For Charlotte, her “normal” day means getting all digital. Not a phone, like the rest of us - but plugged into the world of hearing through her cochlear implant and hearing aid. It’s the first thing she puts on and the last thing she does is take it off before bed.
I have been going in before the school year starts to have one-on-one conferences with Charlotte’s teachers since she was in preschool. I guess it’s really one-on-two conferences because I bring her. I show the teacher how to work her equipment, let them practice helping her get them on, if they fall off, and talk about batteries and blinking lights and what not. I want her teachers to not be scared of the fancy equipment and help normalize it for the rest of the class. Remember, most teachers have never touched a hearing aid or cochlear implant - so letting them touch and feel will help them be more comfortable with your child wearing them every day. Always let them do the magnet themselves, so they can see it’s not hurting your child - but HIGHLY impacts what your d/hh child hears. Like EVERYTHING.
Cochlear magnet off = deaf
Magnet on = access to sound and LEARNING and CONNECTION to others
I’d also recommend familiarizing the school nurse with everything. That’s where their teacher will send your child, if something isn’t working. And while they ultimately just call you to come help, making sure they are in the know is good, too. Many times this year we could problem solve over the phone, so I didn’t need to leave a client meeting. BUT sometimes I’d have to put my life on pause to run over to Maybeury with a fresh cochlear battery or new CI cord.
And hey - Don’t get frustrated at these times… use them to practice appreciation. It’s truly an amazing blessing that your child doesn’t have to depend on another person to interpret what they are saying in order to connect and communicate with others. Instead - just like all of us these days with phones and computers - they just need a tech reboot of some sort and off they are to the life races again!!!!
Good at Faking it
Lastly, a little reminder that kids are SMART! Char never appears to work as hard or struggle as much as she does because she’s an amazing life actress. I’m betting you know what I’m talking about? How many times have you started giving your child directions for something and they nod and agree and say, “Sure!” - but then say… “What did you say?”
I learned early on that when Char began to repeat “What did you say?” more often than usual, something needed to be checked - her technology or her hearing at the audiologist.
She doesn’t want me fussing over her ears any more than any of my kids enjoy my constant nagging about brushing their teeth better. BUT it’s necessary.
Don’t let your kid fool you OR their teacher. They ALWAYS need their ears on and this is the foundation for any success with cochlear implants or hearing aids. Like kids who need glasses to see - they key to success is actually wearing them!!
GOOD LUCK AND KEEP IT UP, PARENTS!!!
P.S. This might be the longest blog post ever - but I’m sure I could keep sharing about school and will. In the meantime, feel free to shoot me an email with questions or if you just want to connect and share about your experiences - I’m an open book! Hugs!!