We all know that reading is important. It impacts our daily life so much that we read on autopilot. We read street signs, food signs, billboards, text messages, emails, books, papers, comedics and so much more. As an adult, I understand how important reading is to my life, but how do you relate the urgency of reading to a child who doesn't want to read. We know as teachers that children should learn how to read. As a deaf educator that need to teach children how to read another language and how to be skilled enough at it so they can get through life independently.
Here are a few strategies that can help encourage children to read and how we can adapt it to our children who are deaf and hard of hearing.
Making predictions: I got this strategy off of this website: http://www.readinga-z.com/more/reading_strat.html#predictions. Making predictions help students to stay engage in the reading so they will be able to see if they were able to predict the story correctly. To make predictions you need to be able to look at the photos, the title of the chapters, maps, and photos ect. Then write down the predictions about the text and then as your read revise your prediction as you learn more and more about these characters. For children who are deaf you'll need to model how to make predictions. You'll have to be patient because some children who are deaf have a hard time to think beyond a concrete concept. You'll have to model that its okay to get a prediction wrong and the way your thinking process of why you can to that prediction.
Ask and Answer Questions: I also grabbed this strategy off of the same website. This strategy also encourages to participate in what they are reading. Before the reading have the students ask a question about the title, or any photos that they see. Then as the students read, write down any questions that they have. These questions can be questions of confusions or curiosity, anything really. Then as the students continue to read and find out the answers have them write them down. At the end of the story, that the students analyze to see if all the questions were answered. If not, think if there is any other outside source that you can get those answers from. For children who are deaf or hard of hearing you might have a set of questions that have already written so they can look for those answers, make sure you keep the questions simple so they are able to search for the answers. As they start to read more and more independently, model what to do and have them run the questions by you so they can have a better understanding of what to do.
Break up larger reading sections: I got this strategy from this website: http://www.isu.edu/~kingkath/readstrt.html. It states that you should break up a large section up into smaller sections. This way you are not weighed down by the large chapter but you are able to break it up and talk about it smaller sections. This would be ideal for your students that are operating on grade-level or a few months behind. This way, you can help your student learn to read the same books that they are reading in class but they might need to read it slower and have longer time processing it.
Visualizing: I was able to get and explore this strategies using this website: http://reading.ecb.org/teacher/visualizing/index.html. This website is advertising their curriculum called: "Into the book" but this strategy can be used with any type of reading. It basically says to read the story page by page and draw what they story is talking about. What a perfect strategy for our children who are deaf! Make what they are reading visual, meaningful, and authentic. I did this strategy this week without realizing it. We were reading a story about a messy room, so I brought items that were in the book and made a mess. I placed the items where the book said, for example: the books were by the door. The student loved it, it made it hit home when I asked the questions. Simple things like that makes a huge different to our kids.
Prior knowledge: I was also able to get this strategy off the previous website. As teachers we all know that accessing our prior knowledge is a perfect way to help our little ones to better relate to what they are reading but how do we find out what exactly they know versus what they don't know. If the student you are working for is able to communicate you can directly ask the student about a certain concept and see if they are familiar with it. I think as teachers we need to really use our resources: parents, family members ect... to see if that student has exposure to that theme or concept. This might be the hardest part to pull out of our deaf kids but we need to be able to come down on their level and relate our story to their lives. It is the only thing that will help them relate and fully understand the story.
