According to the Center for Child Well Being, in 2010 the most common birth defect, hearing loss, affects 3 of every 1,000 births.
For teachers of hearing impaired preschoolers, pictures, graphs and hands-on activities can enhance lesson plans. Children who are hearing impaired or deaf use their other senses to process and understand information.
The light in your classroom is very important. A hard-of-hearing student needs to be able to clearly see facial expressions and visuals. If he is just starting to learn to lip read, he need faces to be clearly illuminated.
Seating a hearing impaired student by a window is not advisable. Glare can impede visual vantage points. Instead, seat the child close to the teacher and have the group form a circle so the hearing impaired child can see everyone.
Pictures in books or play models help teachers express the details of a topic to hearing impaired children. Similarly, felt boards, or flannel boards, can be used to illustrate a story or tell a story directly. Finger plays, also called action rhymes, in which preschoolers act out a song, also enunciate details of a story.
Although songs may seem impractical at first, hearing impaired children can use them to expand residual hearing and are educated in the way of language through lyrics. Music also helps expand focus and attention when differentiating between auditory sounds. Music can be used through voice or, alternatively, a child can join in by holding on to or sitting on a speaker to get a sense of the intonation and bass of a song.
The parents of a hearing impaired child can best identify questions raised about his or her hearing loss. For example, what evaluations have been performed? What were the results of these evaluations (such as determining which frequencies the child hears the best)? How has the hearing loss affected his or her general development?
Creative activities in the classroom can be continued at home. Not only will this help a student learn in a comforting setting, but it may also teach parents what they can do on their own to improve their child's language development. Parents can also become aware of possible problems and notify the teacher, creating a lasting connection to their child's education.
Deciding which preschool to send your child to is a daunting task for the most informed parents. A mainstream school prepares the child for real life communication situations. Speech is also learned in a "normal" manner from others who can hear. However, in a deaf school program hearing impaired children will not feel out of place. They also will be surrounded by children with audio impairments and know will how to handle hearing issues when they arise. So which to pick?
One compromise is a mainstream preschool with a hearing-impaired program. This allows hard-of-hearing and deaf students to learn alongside hearing peers while gaining a mainstream education. Preschools such as the Tucker-Maxon Oral School in Portland, Oregon offer this type of learning environment. Other programs gear things solely toward the hearing impaired, but concentrate on providing a language-intense education found in a mainstream preschool.