Today we welcomed back a 4 year old little girl and her family today for her 4th assessment. She had suffered a bilateral haemorrhage, leading to cerebral palsy. She had suffered the bleeds shortly after birth and the doctors had told mum and dad that 'if she survived' and they did not expect her to, she did not have a bright future and would most likely have severe disabilities. However, she is doing very well indeed.
At four years of age she is now top of the developmental ladder in visual development being able to read via both sight recognition and through phonological building of a word from it's constituent graphemes / phonemes. Auditory development which was plagued by sensitivity around 2.6 Khz is now also at the top of the developmental profile. The sensitivity issue is important because although human hearing goes right up to 20,000 Hz, the 43 speech sounds of the English sound system are compressed within a frequency range of 450Hz - 4,500Hz. A sensitivity at 2, 500HZ, which is right in the middle of speech sound frequencies is likely to cause problems in processing speech sounds and therefore in producing those speech sounds in the form of language. The sensitivity has been dealt with by the activities of the Snowdrop programme and she now understands language in advance of her age and produces perfect, grammatically correct language.
Yes she has some problems with visual acuity but when there is also a retinal bleed that is almost inevitable. Gross motor development has progressed from 18 months to the 36 month level, which considering she has been on programme for 16 months, is phenomenal progress, although we have to work on quality of movement. A very intelligent little girl here, who will go a long way!
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