Site Visit – Capstone Post #4

For my site visit, I went to observe a speech and auditory therapy session at Listening Partners. People that get cochlear implants need this kind of therapy after the surgery. If they are very young and don’t know how to speak yet, they need the speech therapy because they need to hear a word more times to learn it. And even if they already know how to speak when they get it, they still need the auditory therapy to teach their brain how to hear with the implant.

Before the session started, I asked Tara Gallagher, a therapist, a few questions and I learned a lot from her. Then I watched her work with a four year old girl who has cochlear implants in both of her ears.

First they worked on her speech by playing “Go Fish”with cards that had pictures on them. Go Fish is a card game in which each player, taking turns, asks an opponent for a particular card and is told to “go fish” from the deck (grab another card), if the opponent doesn’t have the card you asked for. The person who ends up with the least cards wins. The girl did great.

Afterwards, Tara worked on her listening skills. She asked the girl to complete certain tasks on a worksheet following two and three step directions like, “can you please color the bear that’s about to jump, green?” It’s not as easy as it sounds but the girl did great again!

I really enjoyed observing this therapy session and I thought that it was very interesting. I really learned a lot!