Tips from Families on Helping Deaf/HH Kids with Reading
Hey, moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins & siblings of deaf kids! Any ideas for helping the kids with reading? Please post on the Read with ASL Facebook page, and comment on posts! You can also send a FB message. Below are some tips from families.
WF: Read all the time, right from the beginning. If you're just learning ASL, children's books are GREAT to practice. Simple (or even wordless!) kids books are wonderful to boost your ASL skills and boost your children's early literacy. Read to them every day!
TG: Read to the child and read with child. I remember always asking my deaf dorm staff to read the 3 Bears and Goldilocks like 3 to 5 times a week until I was 9 years old.
JO: Finger spell all the time. Sign the word and then finger spell it. Make it a game- sign an object, finger spell it and then have your kid find it in the house. Later, play the game just using Finger spelling.
AE: Fingerspelling our way to reading is backed up by research and is a proven way to get dhh kids to learn to read and build literacy skills
JP: Visual phonics and/or a Strong ASL foundation!
EP: Introduce cued speech when they are young and you are reading to them. It gives them knowledge of phonemic patterns of speech even if they can’t hear a lick!
MB: All we did was read to my daughter then at about 3 I started having her repeat after me one word at a time them we went to full sentences she is now 9 reading great and is reading chapter books. We have tried signing some of the words but she rather just read so we don't use signs when reading plus we are still slowly learning.
Megan Dornbush: Something to consider – Our TOD suggested not reading the words of the books, but telling the stories in the pictures. I was feeling like you, challenged in signing stories, and this advice helped a lot! He can engage with the pictures and we can tell pretty much any story we want using the vocabulary the picture describes. It’s fun! And way more useful for my own learning of ASL as I have to seek out new signs, I feel a little more free to be a story teller than a story repeater. Hope that makes sense! Good luck!
Will F to Megan Dornbush: This is known as making a conceptual translation. It’s actually an important aspect of teaching literacy to Deaf children!