Can you believe Lily will be going to preschool this next Fall? Where did the time go? This is a big step and created a hard decision for our family. We have been big promoters of Lily being bilingual/bimodal with ASL and spoken English as her two main forms of communication. This presented a big challenge for us in trying to figure out what the best option might be for our little bug. So far her language has included sign from ages birth to 12 months and from that point forward has been spoken English with signed support. She has learned both languages side by side and we want to ensure that this continues for her. This made the decision making process more complicated than for parents who only wish for their child to use spoken language.
What do you do in this situation...our choices were an intensive oral school for deaf and hard of hearing children, a community preschool with all hearing children and no other deaf children, the preschool at the school for the deaf, and a developmental preschool in our school district. The big thing is the IEP meeting and making sure we express our thoughts and concerns for Lily's language acquisition. It took us a while to wrap our heads around how to go about expressing our concerns and Lily's needs when it comes to the rest of the IEP team. How do you explain to a team that Lily is doing so great with speech yet ask for a classroom with signed support? This seemed to be our biggest challenge and may still be. Lily's hearing ability has not effected her cognitive learning. She knows her ABC's, numbers from 1-20, colors, and shapes in both ASL and spoken English. So, obviously this is going to create a challenge in getting what we want for her as far as the type of preschool classroom we want for her. So here is what we are hoping for her at this point. We had to go with our hearts and not our heads on this a little. We want her in a signed support preschool classroom. We also want to see her spoken English develop on track. Our plans, if we can convince the team to agree, are for Lily to attend two schools. The school for the deaf preschool so that she has that signed support to encourage her continued use of asl and the community preschool to support her spoken English. We plan to do this in two parts. Lily would attend the school for the deaf in the mornings the first half of her 3 year old year. The second half she would attend the school for the deaf in the morning and the community preschool in the afternoon. We are really hoping that our IEP team can agree with our goals for Lily.
With this decision being so hard I can only imagine what it will be like to figure out kindergarten! The one thing we do know is we want both languages fostered on an even level and will be doing so inside of our home and in Lily's school life as much as possible. With access to both languages our little Lily will move mountains one day!
