A Blue Moment
I am in college to become a special education teacher but I currently work part-time in a special education classroom as a paraprofessional.
We had a six year old girl with autism last year- sweetest kid in the world, but she didn’t speak. Her mom had given up, and eventually she split and left her daughter in foster care.
Luckily a foster family in the area took her, so we were able to continue working. She was working well with a speech device, and that was enough for her teacher… but not for me. I tried to get her to speak at every opportunity.
June rolls around and it’s the last 2 weeks of school. She’s come a long way and done so much, but still hasn’t said a word in her life. We’re outside, playing in the grass, and I ask her “Jane, what’s your favorite color?”.
I expected the mechanical voice of the touchpad, but instead she deliberately pointed to the sky and said “Blueee”. I cried, the other paraprofessional cried, and we called her foster parents so they could cry too. We never dreamed that would happen, but it did.
She’s doing very well this year and has a vocabulary of about 20 words. I babysat for her over the summer and her 5th word was “friend”, in reference to me. Story credit: Reddit / [deleted]