Learning to use speech

I was diagnosed deaf quite late, which explains why my acquisition of speech and learning was so behind, I had to catch up and with the help of my hearing aids.Wearing hearing aids wasn't always straight forward to begin with as i was very young and  disliked putting them in my ears so a teddy bear and fake hearing aids on him to show me how cool he was wearing them put me at ease - when i realised I could hear better and I then became confident putting them in.

A speech  therapist began visiting me at home before I attended Penhale preschool nursery which had a local unit for deaf children attached - (these were called PHU Partially hearing Units and specialist teachers were there to teach deaf children to use the Aural approach ( using speech)).  I did begin to catch up. My  mother- Margaret was the one behind my learning to acquire sounds and letters, she never gave up and always made sure i repeated sound to sound( still does now ha ha!). Various tools were used  - books, toys pictures and the balloon.

I can vividly remember holding a balloon up to my mouth in some of my therapy lessons at school and being told to feel the sounds vibrating through my hands and being rewarded for each noise i got correct . It was a very frustrating time in my life - but I thank my mother for her determination. I was lucky as i did have some residue hearing to work with and as my speech improved so did my interaction and i was then weaned and placed in a normal classroom within school with the hearing children on a full time basis.   

This was probably an old method used in the 80s and as far as im aware is not used today - one thing i learnt from this balloon technique was that it made my sounds very nasal and it wasnt until later in life i realsied sounds can from other parts of the body by tummy and use of breathing techniques..