Caught in the act

Chance is doing very well. His speech is very good too and sometimes it is hard for people to know what he may need to be working on if they are not familiar with deaf children and don't know the specifics.

The speech therapist at the school is covering for the speech therapist that worked with Chance last year while she is on some sort of hiatus. I've heard that she will be back at the beginning of the new year or thereabouts. In the meantime, the speech therapist told me that Chance is doing very well and she was wondering what she should be working with him on. I don't know if the communication between the regular speech therapist and the one covering was very thorough, but it doesn't seem like the new therapist knows much about what Chance had been working on.

The speech therapist seems like a great lady and is very nice and I told her that I would give her some examples of where Chance needs some aid. Chance will say things sometimes in a way that shows he does not fully grasp how language should flow together. It is not horribly bad, but it is stuff that needs to be addressed. The older Chance gets, the more that will be expected of him and it will be assumed that he knows certain things about the way our language flows.

I forgot to bring a sample of some of Chance's language that could be worked on when I went to the school to help out this past week, so while Chance was having a down time reading, I took his laptop and began to go through some of his writing assignments. I knew that I had seen some language glitches while reading through some of his work.

The class was silent since the students were reading, and apparently I was so engrossed in writing down samples of language from Chance's work to give to the therapist, that I missed the fact that the teacher had told the class to pull up something on their computers. Chance came to me to get his computer and then into the silence of the room asked quite loudly,"What are you doing?!" The whole class looked at us.

My first thought was,"Um.........."

What was I supposed to say while the entire class was listening, "Chance I am picking out mistakes in your language in some of the papers you have written so that your speech teacher who will come to collect you in a few minutes for speech, knows what to work on with you? I'm picking our your language mistakes honey!"

Thankfully, after Chance's initial loud question of,"What are you doing?" he was more concerned with looking up on the computer what his teacher was telling him to.

Shortly thereafter, the speech therapist did come for Chance and while Chance ran to the bathroom, I went over the language issues I had pulled out of Chance's writing.

One of the examples that I gave to the speech therapist was this sentence out of Chance's writing: "Do you want more time to trick or treat? Well, I have some good reasons to tell you." Chance will be in junior high next year and it will be assumed that he has a grasp on the language to a certain degree. And he does have a good grasp on the language in a lot of ways, but sometimes I see things like this that he has written and it becomes clear that we need to work some on getting the language in his head ontothe paper a little better. Chance is a good writer, he just needs to fine tune some things.

The speech therapist said it was very helpful and gave her an idea of where she could be working with Chance.

Chance has never asked me what I was doing again and seems to have forgotten the matter.
We have Chance's IEP this week, so having examples of speech mistakes should help the speech therapist come up with ideas of goals that she can work on with Chance.

It all seems to have ended well:)