National Student Speech Language Hearing Association :: Personal Narrative Writing

National Student Speech Language Hearing Association Even though I have only been in college for one semester I feel like I have done something very significant. I have met a person with a disorder, but they are unaware that they have this disorder. This person is a child and he can not speak. I have also experienced a feeling I have never had before. As a speech pathology major, I decided to join a club geared towards speech production and I knew I wanted to work with children. As I was climbing the stairs to my phonetics class, I saw a flyer for N.S.S.L.H.A. (National Student Speech Language Hearing Association). The flyer stated that the organization was only for people who were majoring in Communication and Science Disorders. But it said nothing about what the club did. Out of curiosity, I went to the first meeting on September 18th. I found out that the people in the organization help children and sometimes elderly people with speech problems. The first activity I did with N.S.S.L.H.A. was attending a book reading at Barnes and Noble. I was the first reader of the year and I was so excited because I love to do activities with children. I read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to 15 children and their parents. I was actually also nervous because I wanted to do a good job. When I saw the kids that had come to hear me read I became so nervous that I made mistakes reading a children’s book. Even though this was a big deal to me, I had no idea of what was to come. I found out that the following weekend was a Flagstaff Family Day. This day was dedicated towards early intervention awareness. So when I arrived there I saw that most of the children were impaired somehow. Some of the children couldn’t pronounce certain letters, but there was one little boy named Jason who couldn’t talk at all. I decided to spend time with him because I had never spent time with a child like him before. Jason is about three years old and I was amazed by him. Since he is so young he doesn’t quite know that he has a speech disorder. I was making crafts with him; stuff like paper tambourines and masks.