There are open questions and closed questions. As a mother I produced closed questions. Do you want a sandwich? potential answer is yes or no. Most kids older than 15 minutes know this.

Closed questions are the fastest way to get an answer. Jim Pollard's wonderful book "Hurry up and Wait"gets right down to my area of teaching speech to deaf kids. Really you can just substitute person with HD for hohkid.

I had 3 levels of speech for Reid including phoneme which is a simple sound like bah, ma, wah. At age 2 Reid was still only using these three sounds due to his deafness. Ba was a bottle, ma was me and Wah was water.
The child's response was to scream if he did not get what he wanted.

After seeing the miracle worker my kids took Reid to the tap and put his hand in water saying wawa wawa.,It worked and Reid produced his first double phoneme.

Everytime I said a phoneme I also said the right word. ba bottle.I also used it in a sentence. Ba BOttle. Do you want a bottle. My job as a mother is providing modeling for the words.

Dr. Ling's method required retraining the mother to only provide open questions. The questions became Do you want a peanut butter sandwich or a ham sandwich. The child wants to eat and will try to say which sandwich he likes and he is effecting his own choice from the words right there. I also had 15,000 sandwich cutters which made birds and flowers so the child also got to choose a shape which is more vocabulary.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2009 08:11AM by dustyblues.

That's a very good tip, Dusty! People with HD have slower processing. I learned that it just doesn't make sense to ask what my ex wanted for dinner as if the options were endless when what I had in the fridge were shrimp and chicken.

That's exactly it. Open questions are a learned thing. And reviewing the choices for dinner verbally focuses on the choice to be made. Plus I think vocabulary goes up and down in memories but the more you use it the closer it is to recall.

I do a fair number of surveys sometimes cuz I'm always trying trying to win things. Recently I have found myself incapable of answering a five part answer,and getting angry at what ends up wasting my time. FOr years I have watched the bi polar person fill in every five part question with choice one or 5. My own choice is to use the first yes, no option in the middle.
Another difficulty is translating the emotions of a difficult time to answers on a sheet. I think this is Barb's problem too.
I get stodgy brain too.

When I am chastised by my children which is worse than I ever talked to any of them. One child has an issue that when I talk about their father I'm making life too difficult for her, another child yells which means I cannot swallow and have to spit out food. With his new meds Ross is doing this too. I cannot speak in this situation and either feel sad or very angry.

Dusty, you're so smart! That's exactly what i get mad at Dan for lol. When Elisa comes to stay the weekend, he will say to her, what would you like to eat? And then it turns into, well grandpa, let's go see what's in the cupboard lol. And i will get so mad, i tell him, no, tell her her choices, she doesnt have her pick of the cupboards. You ask her would you like this this or that? She likes knowing what her choices are too. Very good post Dusty