Signing

When Kimmie was about 18 months old, the doctors were unsure about how well she could hear. She did not respond consistently to sounds or to her name being called. I took Kimmie for an auditory brainstem response test. According to the results of this test Kimmie had a significant hearing loss, not profound, but moderate to severe hearing loss. I'm not sure the results were accurate. Following this test Kimmie was fitted with hearing aids and we began signing with her.

We had already begun to learn sign with some friends who have a deaf daughter. After Kimmie's test results, we began working more directly with her and she began to use sign. When Kimmie was 3 years old and in preschool, her teacher recognized that sign was Kimmie's natural means of communicating. The teacher made a point of hiring for the next year an assistant with signing skills. She also directed us to have placed on Kimmie's Individualized Education Plan (IEP) the instruction that Kimmie required a signing assistant. Since Kimmie was 4 years old she has had a signing assistant with her at school.

Kimmie signs in sentences now, maybe not always complete sentences, but she strings the words together. We can fill in the articles and prepositions that she leaves out to make the sentence complete. Kimmie can spell almost every word that she can sign, or at least string enough of the correct letters together that we can sound out and decipher what she means. Sometimes it gets challenging as we try to remember all the letters and sound them out in our heads.

She is a smart little girl with a fabulous memory.

--Mom