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Life Education delivers vital programmes that address the challenges young people face, from mental health and wellbeing to making healthy choices about their future. Their mobile classrooms travel to schools across Aotearoa with Harold the Giraffe, reaching thousands of students each year.

Ko Taku Reo has been working with Life Education to make these programmes more accessible and meaningful for deaf and hard of hearing students, and recently, that partnership led to a moment none of us could have planned.

Harold now wears hearing aids on his visits around the motu. During one session, a student who wears a hearing aid himself spotted Harold's while he was chatting away. It fell off, and the student immediately said, "Harold, I didn't know you had a hearing aid!"

That one comment opened up a whole conversation with the class. We talked about how Harold wears a hearing aid, how it sometimes falls off when he gets excited, and how he doesn’t always wear it. The student related to Harold straight away, shaking his head and showing us how his own hearing aid does the same thing.

As a class, we started talking about how we could help Harold keep his in place. The student suddenly lit up. "I know the perfect solution!" he said, and was adamant he needed to run back to his classroom to get it. His teacher gently explained he didn't need to go right away, so we told him he could bring something in the next time he came.

The next day, he arrived at the front of the line bursting with excitement. He'd found a spare adapter at home and proudly presented it: "This is what Harold needs so it hooks into his ear properly!"

When we said we didn't know how to attach it, he came to the front, took Harold's hearing aid, hooked the piece in himself, and taught the whole class exactly how it worked, giving step-by-step instructions like a true expert. Harold was thrilled.

By the time the class returned for their third session, the student's excitement was obvious. He was so pleased to see Harold wearing his hearing aid and able to hear them all.

We even joked that Harold sometimes takes it out because he gets tired of listening to the grown-ups. Without missing a beat, the student replied, "I do that at home too!"

What started as a hearing aid falling off became something much bigger: a chance for this student to share his own experience, teach his peers, problem-solve, and make a genuine connection with Harold. It also gave the whole class a safe, natural way to talk about hearing aids, why we wear them, what happens when they fall out, and how we can support the people who use them.

Most importantly, none of this was planned. It happened simply because Harold had something that let one child see a little piece of himself in him - a reminder that the most meaningful learning moments are often the ones we never see coming.