Listening Girl

I went to Laynie's rehab session on Friday. Of course, she continues to make progress and is doing great.

Laynie started a new word/sound list from the WASP program. That program introduces the listener to every sound in the English language, as well as various syllable shapes, like vowel-consonant (of, in) and consonant-vowel (my, be).

I couldn't help comparing how she did with these new words/sounds with how she did the first time with the first WASP list. For one thing, she is much quicker. I think she spent half an hour on the first five words of the first list. On Friday, she got through 10 words in about 10 minutes. And they were much harder words. I was impressed. All of this is through listening only, with the teacher's mouth covered.

Her comprehension has really improved, too. On the first visit, she often said the words perfectly (after many attempts) but had no idea what she said. "Me, me, me, me, hmmm..." Now she knows what she is saying. And these are new words!

So that was cool.

Then they got into the meat of the session: listening to sentences. The teacher says a short sentence, and once Laynie gets all of the words in the sentence, the teacher expands the sentence. Laynie has to listen to where the expansions occur: sometimes adding to the end of the sentence, sometimes inserting words in the middle of the sentences. Sometimes a word from the original sentence is changed.

Obviously this is pretty hard, because Laynie has no idea what the sentences might be. It's not like she has a list of choices. She just has a blank sheet of paper in front of her.

She did such a great job! The teacher says the sentence until Laynie makes a guess at one of the words. Sometimes she just gets a word right. Often she is close, like guessing watch for walk or your for are. It's so neat that she can do that just from listening.

I am so proud of Laynie! And glad that she has weekly rehab sessions for the next few weeks. Imagine: she's doing this well after only having two or three sessions in the last two months, because of vacations and whatnot. She's going to do great when she's focused on listening more often.