A three year old girl wearing hearing aids and pigtails has been joining her mom at our parent program. We learned that the family lives about an hour away by motorbike but they’ve been making the trek each evening to participate. Tonight, Judy involved them in the teaching. Using a plastic container of blocks, she showed the mom how she can use play and everyday interactions to encourage language development. Judy’s wonderfully descriptive face and warm nature combined with her knowledge and ability to present information clearly made it a lot of fun to watch her interactions with this little girl. She got both mom and daughter laughing and engaged throughout the demonstration and Judy’s coaching efforts. It was magical stuff.
This morning, the participants in our teacher program were divided into three smaller groups of about 30-35 people based on their experience and backgrounds. They’ll remain in these groups now for the duration of the workshop, rotating through speech language pathology, early intervention, auditory verbal education 
and audiology course work.
Meanwhile, upstairs, daily private consultations that will be conducted throughout the month got underway. Members of our team are meeting with individual families to answer questions and give advice specific to their child’s hearing loss. There are a lot of moving parts to this program and its really cool to see it all roll like a well-oiled machine.
The audiology team really got creative today. Martha and Jill brought along hearing testing equipment and the teachers were thrilled to be able to interact with it all. They tested each other – good news, they all checked out with normal hearing – and practiced Ling sound checks. They were laughing and having a blast.