Hannah Update

Since it has been so long since I have regularly posted, I thought I would do a catch up on each of the treasures.

Starting with the youngest---just because she is so cute :)

Hannah was 9 in February.  This is her sporting our first dive into yarn braids!  She loves them.  The first day she came down with 7, yes that is right, 7 different hair styles!  She is loving playing with her new long "hair".

She technically should be finishing the 3rd grade, but due to her learning challenges she is anywhere from 1st to 2nd depending on the subject.

Some of our challenges of late have been for all of us to learn what living with 'invisible special needs' looks like.

Hannah has various challenges including, but not limited to; Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), Motor Planning Disorder (MPD) and various learning disabilities, including lower IQ.  Add to these that she is 9 years old, but as tall as most 12 year olds, has Precocious Puberty, and the maturity of a 7 year old.  We can find ourselves in situations that are unsafe or that cause her issues to flare due to lack of supports for her emotional needs.

Example:  trying to explain to a teacher or a coach that she has special needs and needs extra support, they politely nod and mostly seem to ignore you because she looks "typical".  Then she becomes scared (PTSD) and shuts down when they are moving too fast for her (MPD) and she can not understand directions (APD).  Then we end up trying for a few days or weeks to encourage her to process with her limited language skills and bring her back to a point of felt safety.

We have chosen to keep her home a lot and sheltered, but we are going to need to expand to allow her to grow and be challenged.  It is just a learning curve for all of us.  So this summer she wants to try swim lessons and maybe some dance.  We will see how one goes first.  And VBS is always a plus.

Hannah loves to play with stuffed animals and dolls, for hours by herself.

She has really expanded her ability to play with others in the last year and this mamma's heart is thrilled to hear her playing and speaking in a "normal" manner with other kids!!  Yahoo!!!

Hannah has become my number one coupon shopping helper.  She helps sort coupons and find items on the shelf.  She thinks it is fun, unless Caleb is along, then she slips into his mood of 'bored out of your mind' and it is no fun for any of us :/

I thought I would end with a story she told me this morning.

Hannah's life as a grown up. She is going to marry a handsome man that she can kiss.  The will have one 'dotted' (Dalmatian) dog, because all married people get dogs!!   He will work at Walma*t and drive a motorcycle, because all newly married guys drive them.  She will be a stay at home mom and drive a van.  She is going to have 3 kids, 2 'borned' of her tummy and one 'dopted' from China!

Guess she has it all planned out:)

Gotta love the minds of kids.

Concepts in Pictures and Color

I have so enjoyed all I am learning this year in helping teach my youngest treasures, whom have learning challenges!

Interestingly both Hannah and Caleb have been diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder, but both of them display it in totally different fashion.

Caleb struggles with hearing and discriminating sounds, so  he really struggles with spelling and hearing the words he is reading.

Hannah struggles with storing and reproducing sounds in the proper order.

Caleb has an amazing memory when it is in story or sentence form, but struggles with memorization of math facts and processes, grammar rules, and sequenced things like months or books of the Bible.

So he can memorize verses and speeches to amaze people, but still can not tell you the months of the year every time.

Hannah on the other hand has always struggled with memorizing of any sort.

In fact we were recommended not to try to have her memorize for quite a while.

This last year she memorized the whole 23rd Psalm and we were so very proud of her.

We used lots of hand motions and changed some words to help her.

And example would be, "in the presence of my enemies".

She was really struggling with this line till I figured out it was the word "presence" that was throwing her off.

Her idea of this was "presents", and it was not going to change from the concrete form of 'presents' to the non-concrete form of 'presence'.

So we changed it to "in front of my enemies", and off she went.

As she memorized, she slowly stopped the hand motions, but when she got stuck all I had to do was put my hands in the right place and it would clue in her memory.

All this to preface the above picture-

 I did not want to cram verses into little minds with no understanding.

So with some help from teaching from Dianne Craft I came up with the above picture for Hannah.

With lots of color and pictures she was able to learn the verse and know its meaning at the same time.

I have also learned, at least at this point, we will only work on one verse a week with her.

She needs the constant reinforcement and when I try to add in a second verse for her Awana she mixes up the two and intertwines them and their meanings.

So I will be praising God for each verse and picture she memorizes at her own special pace---

Just the way God made her!

A Therapy Update

A while back, I said I would write more about what we are learning in regards to Auditory Processing Disorder with Hannah and Caleb.


So here goes with some trepidation, because I know their therapist has this sight--guess she can correct me this way.


We have known basically since Hannah came home (at 3 years old) that she had speech issues. She was unable to make many sounds, she stuttered, limited vocabulary and understanding, and limited ability to recall words, nor could she listen and repeat what she heard, such as a story.

When she was about 5 we started with our present therapist and the OPD was high on our list of culprits for the speech issues, but due to her age and lack of vocabulary we choose to wait on testing to get a more accurate picture.


This is what we have been working on this summer.


As we began her testing and I was answering a long questionnaire, I started questioning whether this might also be an issue for Caleb. His schooling his becoming more of a battle, listening has always been an issue, his spelling and reading were falling farther and farther behind. We were starting to see more language, vocabulary, and retention issues also as school became more and more difficult for him.


What we found is very interesting.


Hannah has trouble storing her words correctly, therefore has trouble recalling and using those words. She also needed help on fluency and pacing of her words. And the basics of how to form sounds.


Caleb will also be working on basics of how to form sounds, so he can learn to hear and discern them from one another. We also found he can not filter out background noise! Nor does he hear the ends of words or the ends of sentences---makes it kinda hard to follow any directions or listen to coaches or teachers or anyone.

Caleb now wears ear plugs when doing school and it is helping tremendously (more on this later).

So here is where we started 4 years ago when Caleb was just 6 and home a year from Liberia.


Remember, Liberia is "English speaking". But not really like American English.


Also remember, you have most of your language acquisition in the first 3 years of your life. So basically, both kids are English As A Second Language (ESL), though I am really just learning to what extent this has been a challenge for them.


Liberia has very few consonant blends, so neither of the kids could really make blends like these above. So I taught these (and many more) to Caleb and help him learn how to put the sounds together (really he could not do it without work).


Abeka teaches them basically as one sound, so that is how I taught them.

So moving to present. Caleb can not discern the two sounds d-r. Therefore he can not write them and if he tries to sound out the word 'drum' you might get 'jum' 'dum' 'jrum' or 'drun'.

Then he just gets frustrated and starts just guessing some of the oddest things.So where we are is using these disks to help him visually separate the sounds out. He does not have the card sitting there to help!

You know using all your senses together.

Yellow is always a vowel. and each color stand for a different consonant.Then he says each sound while touching the disk and then puts it together.

Then he writes it down.

These cards have been an amazing help for both the kids to see how to form sounds and to discriminate what sound there mouth is making, by what it is doing. These are for making most of the consonant sounds. We are just starting to work on the vowels, which are an extra challenge for both kids. Caleb to discriminate what vowel is being used, or that he is hearing and for Hannah that and also just saying some of the vowels-some vowels just don't come out right for her no matter how hard she tries :)

Hannah we take the disk example a little farther.

She struggles with all prepositional type (front, back) of words and ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd). The concepts have been very difficult for her to grasp.

So Mr. Gray Horse (she is very literal when naming things:)) sits on our table and she places a disk in front of his head-front, his tummy-middle, and back-tail. This helps her to keep her sounds in order.

Otherwise the word 'pin' can become 'inp' or 'nip'.

You see she gets the right letters, but can not retrieve them in the right order to make sense of the word. Nor can she then read the word and tell you what is wrong.

This simple tool helps to keep her processing in order.

She will actually run her finger along his back and say 'map' then she can tell you that the word starts with 'm'. Without this aid, many time she will just pick one of the letters.

To make this all the more confusing, sometimes she will need no aids at all and get it all 100% correct and sometimes even with all the aids I can think of she will not be able to process at all--those are the days we have short school days. If I try to push she will just get frustrated and actually go farther backwards.

Finally to end this long post, at least for now, here are our new sight words cards.

Caleb and Hannah will be working on memorizing these and continually using them for review. I never found this a necessity for the older kids, but the retention is not the same for these two and hopefully these will help with all those words that don't 'play fair' and words we just use all the time.

Shining Through

The beautiful sunrise from our window this morning!

Through the clouds and fog we saw this beautiful sight!

Kind of like working through the layers of our littles lately.

We peek, we shine, we push, we pull, and we mostly seek.

For some the start of school brings an abundance of joy for both parent and child.

In our home, with our littles, school is a time of trials, testing, and bright spots, like the picture above of learning and growing.

We have decided we will really use this year to seek some answers for some of our challenges.

But it can look like this---

Caleb giving such varied answers at the eye doctor, that she finally has to test him like a very little child to get to the answers without asking him.

Answer for this question is no vision problems and she believes only some small areas that she showed me some therapy to work on to strengthen some things.

It can also look like this--

Hannah working with her speech therapist (testing so we can get an 'official diagnosis'), she answers every rhyming question correctly!

Oh by the way she can not rhyme at all, she does not 'get' the concept!

Thankfully her therapist has worked with her long enough to know this and score her accordingly.

Answer through 2 of the 3 days of testing--Hannah does have Auditory Processing Disorder (APD or CAPD)

So where does his put us on this road--a few steps in and a few steps back.

We are presently working on finding someone or some group that will do a comprehensive evaluation on Hannah and possibly Caleb.

We are not so much wanting labels, as the knowledge of how we can help her within her limitations and abilities.

So we will be looking at psychological issues (trauma), emotional issues (attachment), developmental issues (malnutrition), IQ issues (educational), and the whole range of learning disabilities.

As you can see it would be helpful to have one evaluation that could take into account all areas instead of piecemealing it.

Praying that God would lead us in the right direction, that we may be able to get some answers, and like the picture above start pushing back the clouds to let the kids shine through!

Advocating---

I guess I am still learning---and that is not such a bad thing!!

Sometimes when I speak up about Hannah's special needs, I get people looking at me as though I am crazy. They don't see it. They think I am overreacting. She is just a kid. All kids do that. Especially since her delays are not visible.

So today at our new dentist, I spoke with the hygienist about Hannah's teeth issues (any others of you out there with black spots on kids teeth?), I chose not to breach the issue other than Hannah has some delays and left them to see how it would go.

So I went to sit down and a few moments later I hear her trying to instruct Hannah for a panoramic x-ray. She is using words like: behind, in the front and lower. Hannah has lots of trouble with the prepositional words, she just doesn't get it, at least not regularly. So I walk back there and try to help the lady to understand that with her delays she has to show or touch her to help her do what she is asking. Then gave her a little more detail to help them get along better. I think they did OK, though I am thinking she let Hannah get away with more in the chair than I would have!

Then we go back a few hours later to get sealants on the back molars. She is going back with the dentist and his assistant this time and I had spoken with him some on Hannah's delays earlier and left it at that.

I check half way through and she was doing OK. Then they come out and I can tell Hannah is trying to be brave and all it took was a smile from me and the tears started!! The assistant said that Hannah did not tell them that they were hurting her and they did not know till they saw the silent tears!!

Again, I failed to tell them, because I did not think about sealants hurting or being uncomfortable, that due to past trauma, my dear daughter does not tell people when she is in pain, she does not cry out loud, and that she can deal with a very high amount of pain.

Oh I can not tell you how bad I felt for not advocating for my little one. My blessing who is just learning to use her voice, still needs me to be a voice for her.

Praying Lord for wisdom in advocating for my little one. For compassion for her needs that she cannot voice. For little regard to what others think as I speak for her.

"FELEPHLANT"

Hannah and I had a great time at her speech this week. She always has fun with Ms. Jennifer and I was able to get lots of clarification on some issues we are dealing with!!

We have been really struggling with some vocabulary issues. Mostly her not being able to remember the names of things or when we ask for things she does not know what we are talking about. I was thinking--you've been here for 4 1/2 years and you are 7 years old you know what ketchup is!!

Well as it has been explained to me--Hannah does not store those words in her brain properly---they are mixed up--so when she goes to pull them out to use them she can't get the sounds in the proper order--she then freezes (her stress response) because she knows it is wrong, but really has no idea how to fix it! Interesting!!

So we were encouraged to continue to prompt her with beginning sounds or give her the word. If I have asked her for something and she can't put what she is hearing with what she needs to get, we should try to describe it and move her towards it.

We have worked on pacing words using her knuckles--sometimes she goes so fast--and she does not pronounce every sound--that it becomes hard to understand her. So she makes a fist and points to a knuckle for each syllable. It slows her down and paces her words so she focuses more on making each sound.

We are now using this to help with words that are getting twisted up coming out. An example would be "elephant"--she would come up with something like 'felephlant'. You see the sound are out of order. So when she uses her knuckles and says el-e-ph-ant she gets her sound in the proper order with a visual and kinetic boost (her learning styles), then she can put her hand down and say it correctly!!!

Hannah's therapist enjoys working with Hannah, but does admit that there are so many levels that we are working with that sometimes it is hard to say why things are happening or if they are permanent or if there is only one thing affecting what we are working on. An example would be in the above scenario--is it all auditory processing, or is there some motor planning (how to make the sound), or is there some learning delay (due to her malnutrition)!! It is a multi-layered beast at this point, but I am very thankful for all the help we have found to help us walk this path.

We are hoping that when we start up again after the weddings, to do an official test for auditory processing on Hannah. Though she is sure she has it, it will help her to know where we are heading. And help us get other services if we choose to down the road. It will also help me in writing up her Privately Developed Plan (PDP)--this is like an IEP that schools do. Her PDP will allow me as a homeschool teacher to set her own academic goals, rather than trying to reach a set standard.

A Whole New World!!!

We are finishing up a one hour day of phonics with my little Hannah!! We did take some heavy work breaks for her!!! And she got the whole page done all by herself (okay, with lots of mom help).

Some interesting things I am learning about auditory processing disorder, and probably some other issues such as sensory processing are:

1-Reading is very hard when you have memory issues due to APD, since you can not remember the last word you read in your sentence.

2-Remembering that word you just figured out in the last sentence does not happen and you have to refigure it out.

3-All your vowels sound the same when you put them in words.

4-When you read 'red' as 'rud' it sounds OK to you.

5-You vocabulary is so limited that when you read a word wrong you do not realize that it is not a word, or inversely when you read it correctly you do not realize it is a word.

6-The concept of long and short sounds is extremely hard to grasp (we will be taking a break from this till her next open window).

7-The concepts of ordinal numbers (first, second, ect) are life a foreign language, so when mom keeps saying what does the second letter say, you are at a loss for what she is talking about.

8-When mom reads what you write, you look at her facial expression to decide whether you answer is correct, rather than being able to hear that "Bill sat home fast." is not a correct sentence.

We could go on and on, but I just wanted to give you a little insight into Hannah's world of learning, at least where she is now. Our process is slow, and not so steady, but she is getting it in her own time.

Rather than be frustrated we take joy in the victories and have learned to let her go at her own pace.

And you know.....

Her smile when she gets it says it all!!!!!

She is such a treasure and sometimes I am totally floored that God is allowing me to be her Mom!!!

If you are on the fence about whether or not adoption is for you, and whether or not you can handle a child who is not flesh of your flesh, or whether you can handle the unknowns....let me tell you that from where we stand (and I do understand that there are a lot bigger issues and bigger needs than we have) take the leap and let God guide you through the process into a whole new wonderful world!!!!!!!

Visual and Tactile

So what do you do with a VERY visual and tactile child?

Well you don't give them TOO many worksheets....unless you are constantly adding too it!!

Hannah was really struggling to spell the words on this sheet--the three letter ones.

So I pulled out the Boggle Jr. game and gave her the letters---and she spelled nest and drop faster and with no mistakes!!!

Something with using the blocks allows her to separate the sounds she is hearing into letters. Take the blocks away and back she goes to not hearing the sounds in the correct order.

I know this has something to do with her auditory processing issues, as the therapist has used this to help her with producing sounds also.

Now we are just working on short "i" -- she seems to have real trouble saying or hearing it. Trying to decipher if it is cultural or processing. My guess is the processing.

But it is very hard to correctly write the spelling of a word if you can not say it correctly. I am guessing we may have to move a little away from phonics with this child.

Sometimes I imagine what her life would have been like back in Liberia. Knowing all her special needs and extra help she is requiring to overcome them...I wonder how she would have made it in a culture that does not have the resources or the inclination to work with a child who needs special help.

Would she have ever learned to read?
Would she have been able to attend school?
Would she have been prepared to move into adulthood?

I praise the Lord that he brought our beautiful little girl into our home to love and cherish!!

Praising Him for the new future she has!!

Kinda like us....
God picks us up out of the muck
Cleans us off
Adopts us as His children
Gives us full rights of inheritance
And gives us a new future!!

Amazing how he adopts us as we are, not how we will be!!!!

Praising God today for my adoption into His forever family!!!

Morning Discussion!

One of the joys of teaching a child with learning delays is that you never know what you are going to get....

In answer to the question, "Who drives a car with lights and a siren?"
---"A cave man"

In answer to what is this a picture of (a can, like a soda can)
---"A cana" (which is a combination of the words can and soda, part of auditory processing)

In answer to "I spy something on the table that came from a tree" (acorns)
---"A candle"

In answer to what is the opposite of cold
--"freezing"

So when we came to "What color are lots of barns, apples and fire engines?"----I decided we better leave well enough alone!!!

And there you have a little picture into the mind of a child that see the world VERY differently.