Reading and Writing

Several approaches and suggestions were mentioned by the authors, however challenges continue to impact educating students who are D/HH. In thinking of your classroom, what components of reading and writing do you feel are important to teach and how will you teach them?

All areas of reading and writing are important to a student. For the students who are deaf and hard of hearing these are two crucial areas; especially reading. Our student’s tend to struggle a great deal in the area of reading. It is important to first identify what level the student is at in these two content areas. After this has been identify, create a plan on what will be taught next and then continue. It is important to understand that this plan may not go accordingly: there will be some bumps along the way. For example you may know where the student is at and plan lessons, as your teaching these lessons you may find that a concept within that lesson is unknown to the student. As an educator you must then stop and address the issue to make sure the student has a good foundation before teaching the concept. Within reading you will want to address the following areas: vocabulary, comprehension and letter sound identification. Through-out our course we know that direct instruction works best with our students with a hearing loss.  Some ways I would teach these areas may be: using Visual Phonics in the classroom to provide my students with a visual tool to understand the sounds of each of the letters in the alphabet. A way to work on vocabulary is to find as many activities that support that word: word walls are perfect for vocabulary because it is placed in the classroom and the student is able to see the word every day and all day. A possible sight word activity is presenting the word in multiple formats: having the student write out the word, having the student find the letters that are hidden in a rice bucket, and or having the student listen for the word and find it. Gallaudet has many article on reading strategies that work well with students with a hearing loss.

Writing is also important for all students to learn. They will be using it every day at school.  In my practicum, they use the D'Nealian handwriting technique. Through my lessons I have learned what this technique is and great ways to teach the students how to use it. This technique helps the students not only learn how to correctly write their letters but it helps lead them into learning how to write in cursive. A great strategy to use is having sentence strips with the dotted line in the middle. This allows you to tell the student where the letters start and end by directing them to the top, middle, or bottom line. Another great strategy is reminding the students to not forget the ‘tail’ on the end of their letters.