Did you know that wearing hearing aids and/or cochlear implants is really cool?
Mr. Brillo is really a cool guy, dressed in yellow and ready for a splendid adventure with his colorful crew of animals. With each turn of the page, the story grows, each time adding a new color, a new creature, a new twist to the tale.... and culminating in a full-color party!
This is an inclusive children's book starring a character who happens to be deaf, but is not specifically about hearing loss. Al Sr. Brillo le gusta el amarillo, is an exuberant tale about a funny, quirky guy (who has a white kite that flies on a particular night, as he swings on his scarlet red bed) and his fantastic animal friends. The book will have children laughing as they recite their rhymes as they move from page to page.
The book allows children who use assistive hearing technology to see themselves represented (through the fabulous Mr. Brillo) and shows everyone, whether they have hearing loss or not, that wearing hearing aids and/or cochlear implants is really cool.
For those parents and therapists who wish to use it as a resource for speech and language development, the book integrates listening and spoken language (LSL) strategies, which the author employed when teaching her own daughter (profoundly deaf and aided by cochlear implants) to listen and speak. These strategies include:
Hearing before seeing: New characters and new colors are described in words on the page before we actually see them, allowing the child's brain to process auditory information before visual information.
Use rhyming verse to develop phonological awareness.
Talking up front: what comes next? As the book introduces new colors and new characters one by one, the reader and child can have a lot of fun, guessing and discussing which color and which character might be revealed next.
Practicing auditory closure: Structured as a poem that repeats and builds as the pages turn, the book offers multiple opportunities to practice auditory closure (when the reader pauses and allows the child to complete the next word or phrase).
Aural memory reinforcement: Children will naturally want to join in the recitation of the poem as it is repeated and augmented throughout the book. The reader can pause periodically for the child to recite as much as he or she can from memory.
Expanding vocabulary: This book is a celebration of color... but it does not limit itself to using the most common names of the most common colors. Encourage children to expand their descriptive vocabulary to include different color names, as well as to describe the properties of different colors and what they represent.
Develop understanding and appreciation of humor: This book is fun and has an entertaining storyline and stimulating images, ideal for starting conversations with children about what makes them laugh and why certain things are funny. Why is it fun to watch Mr. Brillo fly your kite at night? Are kangaroos usually blue? Have you ever seen a turquoise turtle (who wishes he was orange) balancing on a ruby red bedpost?
Develop emotional intelligence and theory of mind: The central concept of this book is the exploration of preferences: different people (or animals, in this case) like different things - in this book, this is expressed through different characters who prefer different colors for different reasons. This can open up wonderful discussions with children about their own preferences, why they have them and why other people may or may not agree with them, and this, too, is fine!
Text in Spanish.
