Reflection Journal #5

Several approaches were mentioned by the authors; however, challenges continue to impact educating students who are deaf or hard of hearing. In thinking of your classroom, what components of reading and writing do you feel are important to teach and how will you teach them. 

For a beginning reader or a reader with a lower skill level, I want to start by building their phonemic knowledge with structured input and lessons. In class we talked about visual phonics and when it is appropriate to start. If I was working with a young child I would want to use visual phonics to help add a visual to the phonemes. If the student was older, I would probably not use that strategy. I would want to use shared reading and rereading strategies in my classroom and also at home, if the family is involved, which is sometimes not the case. I really liked the Dolch reading videos and strategies for vocabulary development. Also For vocabulary, I would have a class word wall no matter what the age of the students. In the book it states, "D/HH students' knowledge of signs and their meanings can be associated with printed words without the students' having knowledge of the sound-print relationship." If the student signs, focusing on things like multi-meaning words and the variations associated with function words. I also want to motivate my students to want to read and will try to match my selected readings with their interests if I can or to work with the mainstreaming teacher to peak their interest. I would want to focus on the the ending sounds, plurals, and function words, because I know that those are trouble areas for our deaf and hard of hearing students. I know that reading comprehension requires prior knowledge, so I would hope to incorporate skills and lessons that help to build that knowledge base. I would like to incorporate fluency skills and lessons, reading out loud or in sign, but I know that is secondary to other factors while teaching reading. Chaining is a method of teaching the I would want to incorporate into reading because it takes all the steps and reinforcing what was already learned as well as what needs to be learned. This is such a complicated issue and I think that experience will be the best way for me to understand how to teach reading. Right now I feel like I don't have a great grasp of how to teach reading effectively yet, but many of the ideas and reading programs we covered in class gave me some good ideas.