First Grade Blog: Being A Sensitive Friend

       First Grade started a new unit on Being A Sensitive Friend. The children have been learning and reading many books on various disabilities such as blindness, deafness, people in wheelchairs, people who wear braces and more. Some of the books we read were Don't Call Me Special by Pat Thomas, A Very Special Critter by Gina and Mercer Mayer, Can You Hear A Rainbow by Jamee Riggio Heelan and more. They are gaining exposure and an education in order to realize that people with disabilities are not so different from them. They may have the same interests, like to play the same sports, like to play the same games and can be good friends with each other.
       First Grade had a special guest speaker, Morah Chani. She came to talk about hearing impairment and various technology used to help. Morah Chani's daughter Shifra was born deaf. When Shifra was a baby she wore special hearing aides that had an attachment to be clipped on her clothes so she couldn't lose them. As Shifra got older she had digital hearing aides. These had a speaker in the hearing aide that Shifra wore and her teacher would wear the microphone part so Shifra could hear what she was saying.
       Eventually Shifra got the cochlear implant. The implant has a magnetic piece that is under her skin that connects to the microphone in Shifra's ear. Sound is picked up by a microphone. Then the signal from the microphone is sent to the speech processor, a powerful microcomputer that filters, analyzes, and digitizes the sound signal into coded electrical signals. Next, these coded signals are sent to the transmitting coil, actually a radio frequency transmitting antenna. The transmitting coil sends the signal across the skin to the implanted receiver/stimulator (actually a radio frequency receiving antenna and another powerful micro- computer). The receiver/stimulator processes the electrical signals and sends them on to the electrode contacts that stimulate the remaining auditory nerve fibers in the cochlea. Finally the signals are carried to the brain where they are interpreted.

(There is a part that gets implanted inside her cochlea and has a magnet under her skin. It sends sound information to her brain through the cochlea. The processor is worn on the outside. It has a microphone and mini-computer which captures sound and sends it under her skin through the magnetic piece.)

Morah Chani brought in various pictures, diagrams and even some of the different hearing pieces we spoke about for the children to see. It was extremely informative and the children learned so much. Thank you Morah Chani for educating us on this topic.

For more information you can watch the below video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poyj7U2wzhQ