What is the LENA Program & How to Improve Your Child's Listening Skills?
The LENA Program is designed to educate parents and caregivers on the value of two-way dialogue in fostering early reading and cognitive growth in children. The LENA device is a discreet recorder that a youngster may wear to gather essential data about their linguistic and acoustic surroundings.
How does the LENA Program Work?
During the LENA Program, your youngster will wear the LENA gadget in a secure vest for up to four days if your family chooses to utilize it.
Your child's vocalizations, the number of turns in conversations between adults and children, and other audio environment information like background noise and speaker distance will all be included in a report.
The LENA gadget may be used with infants as young as two months old since it measures vocalizations rather than words. Your child's language development may be assessed without the use of words!
How to Improve Your Child's Listening Skills?
To learn to understand speech, children with hearing loss require extensive exposure to language throughout the day. Naturally, the input will only be valid if they use their hearing aids. The primary objective is to be worn constantly when awake.
Generally speaking, if your kid is awake, they should have their hearing aids in. Improving one's listening abilities is crucial for developing one's fluency in spoken language. That is what speech and language therapists work on most.
Recognizing common words and phrases heard in everyday situations is the next step for developing listeners.
Talk to your child about the next step in your routine and see how they react (for example, do they head to the kitchen when you say, "It's time to eat?"). When your child correctly recognizes a term, you may use that opportunity to expand their vocabulary by rephrasing the information ("I'm hungry, let's get supper ready") in a new way. If your youngster needs to pay more attention, try switching up the routine or giving some amusing new instructions.
Consider if your youngster needs to pay attention to what you say while providing information orally. In the case when your child must always locate the same two objects before leaving for school, for instance, they may already know what to find without your having to say it out loud.
The child's vocabulary will grow if, after learning the item's name, you describe it to them without mentioning it. Before heading out the door to school, you may tell your youngster to "Find something that you wear on your feet," for instance.
Increase the Expectations
Your expectations should grow in tandem with the time made possible by modern hearing aids.
Encourage your youngster to work toward a higher number of crucial element identifications. Children must pay attention to and be able to identify these critical factors to implement the instructions successfully.
Each crucial component of the direction must have several options. A simple test would be to check whether your kid can make their teddy bear say "night night" when playing with their stuffed animals (vs. make their doll take a drink). As there is more than one option, your youngster must choose a choice and then identify the corresponding action to follow the instructions.
