If Your Child Is Deaf

Last September five-year-old Gary Lamb knew only two words. Now he has a vocabulary of 30. His nursery school playmate, three-year-old Johnny Henry, now uses ten words; before he could only say one. This week Johnny, Gary and eight other small children, all of them deaf from birth, moved into their new nursery school, a five-room frame bungalow in Phoenix, Ariz. With them went one professional speech teacher and ten enthusiastic amateurs, the children's mothers.

The Phoenix clinic was organized last March by Mrs. Herman Thornton, a lively young brunette who has one deaf child herself. Ten sets of parents answered her invitation, but only one teacher, Mrs. Grace Covey, a motherly looking woman in her 50s who had come to Phoenix to rest and write poetry. It was a familiar problem in speech instruction: too many deaf children and not enough professional teachers to tutor them individually.

To solve it, Mrs. Covey put off her versifying and began intensive training courses for the parents. In an eight-week trial session last spring, she set up instruction classes for the mothers three days a week, and gave homework assignments to the fathers. On Sept. 1, the school started regular classes in a borrowed building. The mothers took turns conducting the play activities and the classes, backed up by Mrs. Covey's early morning instruction periods. The clinic's teaching methods (visual aids, constant repetition of sounds, the vibrations of a piano) have been copied by the children themselves. One little boy taught his sister, who has normal hearing, to make the sound "oo" by demonstrating it. Another clinic pupil, a girl, has her baby brother practicing "p" by blowing against a paper.

As results began to show, the old despairing mood of the parents has changed. Says Mrs. Covey: "There is nothing more thrilling than to see these parents take hold. When they find out what they can do and have [others] to work with, they are different people."

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