Reflective Journals of Gottleib and Herrera Books Essay

Journals of Herrera and Gottleib Books

A healthy child is the joy of the family. Social and academic development of a child depend on his ability to use his eyes and ears effectively. When one of these organs is impaired, the child will face challenges to communicate or see effectively, which will affect the child's social and academic developments. When a child has developed a vision or ear impairment, early intervention is a critical approach to addressing this disability. Typically, young children with one or multiple disabilities have unique challenges and needs. Some of these children struggle to see or communicate their needs. Parents and professionals must identify the needs of each child to ensure that young children with disabilities are able to participate actively and make a meaningful progress in life. Thus, medical, and non-medical interventions are the crucial approach for young children with disabilities since they may exhibit a delay in motor development that can result in sitting, mobility and standing difficulties. When professionals develop a needs-based approach, it will be possible to assist these children in identifying their needs and integrate them into the natural environment. Moreover, professionals are required to have the greatest confidence in themselves to make positive impacts on the child. However, delivering high-quality intervention services for infants with multiple disabilities can present challenges. Their complexities may not be addressed effectively using a single approach, thus, multiple approaches may be essential and a number of service providers will need to be involved.

Critical Reading Reflection for Module 7

Salcedo & Chen (2008) believes that early learning is obtained through observation, visual experience and imitation. However, a baby with a visual impairment may experience a fragmented world making the image of mother blurred and incomplete to the child. It should be noted the ability of children to establish effective social relations and excel in their academic performances depend on the children ability to see images and differentiate the images. While the baby with a visual impairment may hear other people talking, however, the talking may be incomplete unless the adults assist the baby with the systematic instructions. When this instruction is lacking, a child may have a developmental delay. Thus, it is very critical for parents to detect their children visual impairment very early before the issue becomes complicated. Moreover, the parents need to observe their children during their early year to detect any eventuality in the child's impaired development. One way to identify whether a child has a visual impairment is to observe the child when crawling or walking. If the child has the challenges in avoiding obstacles and has a habit of bumping into the obstacles, this is a sign of a visual impairment. Some of the causes of the visual impairments include infections, heredity, or prematurity. This study believes that medical intervention is the first strategy to correct a child's visual impairment using the ocular health, and vision assessment. I believe that the parents need to make a great effort to intervene as early as possible to correct their children visual malformation. However, the intervention should not be done alone; it should be done in collaboration with the healthcare providers. It is very critical to understand that children with visual impairment can face difficulties in establishing effective social relations in schools which can affect their entirely life process. (Herrera, Morales Cabral, & Murry, 2013).

Factors influencing child's Vision Loss

The primary cause of child's vision loss includes prenatal, genetic, maternal infection, and preeclampsia. Other causes of eye vision loss include prematurity, difficult delivery, and asphyxia. Moreover, eye loss can be caused by trauma, intracranial pressure, and tumors. Typically, a child vision's loss can be influenced by the problem associated with visual acuity, which is the inability to see clearly. Moreover, a reduced in contrast sensitivity can lead to an inability to differentiate between dark and light shade. Sometimes, a child faces difficulty in processing his or her visual activities that result in understanding the object seeing. While some children may have one vision loss, some children may develop multiple vision loss. An intervention is an effective strategy to correct the problem child vision loss. Typically, an early identification is essential for the treatment and correction of eye disease. To make an early intervention more effective, the family members are to intervene as quickly as possible. Moreover, the child is to be referred to the pediatric ophthalmologists to diagnose his eye's problem and collecting the medical report about the child's vision disorder. The implication of the medical report is to collect all the medical information about the child's vision and use the medical intervention to correct the problem to assist the child in seeing clearly.

Critical Reading Reflection for Module 8

Apart from the visual impairment, children can also develop a hearing loss. The hearing is the ability to discriminate and detect sounds. From birth, a normal child will be able to differentiate between speech and sound. However, a child with a hearing loss will face challenges in understanding the meaning of speech as well as the meaning of other sounds. (Wayne-Myck, & Chen, 2008).Thus, the parent is required to observe their children, and evaluate a degree of their hearing loss to enhance a greater understanding of the children auditory capabilities. While there are different strategies to address the problems of the hearing difficulties in children, however, these strategies have strengths and limitations. For example, audiometry test can be carried out to measure the child's ability to hear sound through the hearing test to provide the quantitative and accurate results. Moreover, the use of tympanometry is also effective in detecting the movement of the eardrum. The behavioral observation audiometry can also be used to observe the child's faces and change in the child's faces. Moreover, the visual reinforcement audiometry assists in detecting a child's ability to respond to sound. The conditioned play audiometry is effective in teaching a child to respond to a particular action. Thus, it is critical for parents to inform the healthcare providers about their children health conditions as early as possible if they detect that their children have challenges in hearing.

Strategies to encourage listening skills in Children with a Hearing Loss

Different strategies can be employed to encourage listening skills in children with hearing loss. First, the auditory verbal is one of the communication strategies to improve the listening skills of children with a hearing loss. The auditory verbal involves using therapeutic approach to enhance natural communication and assist the child in involving actively in daily activities. The auditory-oral approach allows children to use face-to-face communication. However, this strategy requires the use of hearing aids allow the children to understand speech. Total communication is another strategy to encourage the listening skills of a child. This strategy allows the child to use different communication modalities to assist him to be linguistic competent. In essence, the total communication uses different strategies such as sign language, lip-reading, finger spelling, amplification, and gestures. The bicultural / bilingual approach is to make the child be fluent in English and American Sign Language.

The other strategy is to use the hearing aid; the tool can be used by children of any age. Moreover, the hearing aids will make the sound louder; however, they are unable to make sound clearer. With the intervention of audiologist, it is possible to select the hearing aids that will enhance the listening skills of children. The benefits of using the hearing aids are that it can be adjusted to suit the specific characteristics of a child's hearing loss as well as enhancing the frequency amplification. The digital or analog are the two types of digital hearing aids to improve the listening skills of children with a hearing loss. Typically, a digital hearing aid assists in transforming the sound and convert it into the small segments before amplifying the sound signal. The benefit of digital hearing aids is that it assists in amplifying the soft sound over the loud sounds. The "behind -the --ear- hearing --aids (BTE)" (Chen, 2008 p 25) is another tool to improve listening skills of children experience a hearing loss. The benefit of the BTE is that it assists a child to adapt faster to the hearing aids.

The relevance of what I have read.

This study has enhanced my greater understanding that the early intervention approach has been an effective tool to correct children hearing and visual problems, which will make me, intervene as early as possible when I discover that one of the children has a problem in the school. My goal as an educator is to ensure that children get the best from the school. As an educator, I will use the knowledge I have learned to assist the children identifying their visual and hearing problems. At home, many parents are unable to understand the symptoms of their children visual or hearing problem. I will apply the knowledge I have acquired in the course to identify children with hearing and visual…