I grew up a baseball fan, but used to laugh when my boyfriend, Roy would check the news at night to see if the Cubs won, since it seemed to me all they did was lose. But having grown up in St. Charles, IL, he was a Cubs Fan through and through. Then we got married and moved to Phoenix, AZ. With WGN televising the Cubs and Spring Training at Hohokam Park as our main source of entertainment, this baseball fan became a Cubs fan. It helped that the year was 1984, a great first ye

This is the last page of the first book we co-drew and wrote at home about Dylan and Dad putting the tables together for School-Home. In my last post, I shared my experience of talking with Dylan through tactile sign using a hand-under-hand technique. Often when we think of hand-under-hand, we think of using it to teach someone how to do a task, use scissors, zip their coat, or write their name. It is an alternative to hand-over-hand, where the helper’s hand is on top, making

I remember the first time I felt Dylan’s hands on mine as I signed to him, and how quickly his attention shifted to that signing and my face. He was three years old, and we were walking down the path outside of his preschool. At last there was shared attention with which to foster relationship and communication. I can’t tell you the joy I felt in that moment. We had been modeling visual sign language since Dylan was only a few months old, but he was not initiating signs on hi

Dylan’s expressive language development has been a slow process filled with lots of patience and consistency, before suddenly a new way of communicating would emerge, sometimes even many years later. Can you relate? One example is the use of Dylan’s picture symbols. Dylan has receptively understood key symbols for years and they have been very effective as part of his anticipation calendar. Since his earliest IEP’s, a routine has been incorporated into his calendar routine th

I was talking with Dylan’s Intervener this week about the Communication Matrix and how initiation is such a key aspect of expressive communication. We’ve found it to be so easy to get in the trap of counting all of Dylan’s signed words as “language”—level 7 on the Matrix—but when we step back we find these signs are often imitations, even delayed imitations of something we had signed quite a bit earlier. Using the matrix helps us recognize when Dylan has moved from imitatio

Have you ever felt like you were doing everything you possibly could to help your child or student communicate, and yet felt frustrated by the slowness of their language development? Have you ever felt like you weren't doing enough to help your child or student communicate? I think at times, everyone on Dylan's team - including me - has felt both of these emotions; frustration with his lack of progress and self-doubt or self-blame. Clearly my son, Dylan, was a skilled communi

Photo credit Shulse Photography - used with permission I knew my son was Deaf at 5 days of age. I also knew he had blind spots in his eyes called colobomas, but he clearly saw something. Not yet knowing about deafblindness and the impact of the combined loss, our focus was on his hearing loss. How were we going to communicate with our son? How were we going to know what he wanted, what he felt, what he thought? How was he going to know us? I couldn't imagine how to do that wi

Last week I was fortunate to be able to attend a workshop by Millie Smith for teachers of students with vision impairments and other disabilities. Millie talks the language of education and cognitive development based on Piaget and Gibson. I talk the language of deafblindness. We both talk about the brain and readiness to learn and the neurologically driven shut down or flare up that occurs when teaching is attempted at a level too far above the student’s readiness. I was