After this week of visiting both the Clarke School (for oral early intervention) and the St Frances School (for ASL early intervention), we have decided to enroll Amichai in both programs! He is completely enrolled (and accepted for services by the state) at the Clarke School and had his first day there on Friday. He had a full evaluation of all developmental areas, and as we expected, but of course felt very relieved to hear, was found to only have delay in his hearing responses and was on level or ahead developmentally in all other areas! We will get the full report and write up next week, but those were the clinicians initial comments. Oh, and they were all in love with Amichai, of course :). Next week, we are going to Clarke on Monday for his first speech therapy services and a music class, and then again on Wednesday for speech therapy and the parent/infant support group. In about two months, we will add a third day of speech therapy each week, especially once we have him wearing his hearing aids at all times. The strategy there is for him to learn all of the pre-language skills that a baby needs by nine months (when he will have his surgery) through the development of auditory awareness. They teach him to both recognize auditory input through his hearing aids and to pay attention to it...in preparation for full auditory awareness with cochlear implants. How they will do that is yet to be seen! :) Truly amazing place.
On the St. Francis front, we are currently in the process of applying for state funding for him to receive the services of two days a week of 1 on 1 ASL sessions (1 hr long) and two more speech therapy sessions (bringing us to a whopping five days a week of state funded speech therapy! Incredible). We sat in on a 1 on 1 class with the ASL teacher there...she was so amazingly talented, it was an awesome experience. We will be in the classes with him there as well so we will be learning alongside him. Such an incredible experience--the school was filled with loving, skilled people who were so welcoming and supportive of our choice to supplement Ami's auditory education with sign language. We will find out in the next couple of weeks (held back by the holidays) when he can begin there too!
By the way, while at St. Francis, we scored ourselves an amazing ASL signing nanny (a deaf parent of a deaf student at the school)! She fell in love with Amichai and volunteered herself to be with him seven hours per week starting in January!! So that is seven more hours of exposure to ASL for Amichai each week!!
We feel so confident about our choices for early intervention in both approaches. It will be a tremendous amount of work for us (five days a week of shlep) but so worth it.
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That is sooooo awesome. Ami is so lucky to have you two as parents (and you two so lucky to have such a cute, lively and smiley little boy - though I have a feeling it was not all luck but a loving, supportive environment from birth).
ReplyDeleteRe ASL - we did the baby sign language thing with Noah from birth on which is mostly based on ASL (of course much less intensively than Ami will be getting). It was an amazing experience - by 3.5 months he understood the sign for milk and by 7 months he was doing the sign for milk. From then on he added and added and added signs which allowed us to really communicate with him and for him to really communicate with us really early on (by the end, he had around 200 signs). We plan to do it again with our little girl. All that to say that ASL rocks whether your child hears perfectly well or not.
Hugs to you.