Suggestions for a deaf mom?

[Jessica in KS]

I have several homeschooling friends who are deaf. One of them is schooling 6 kids grade 5 and under. She communicates with her children using ASL, and is not strong in the English language. However, all of her children are hearing, and she would like to teach them to write well in English, though she does not write well, herself. She is currently trying Shurley English and looking for additional resources to help her teach writing. Anyone have any ideas? Perhaps some resources for teaching English as a second language would help?

[...................]

This sounds like a great scenario for Excellence in Writing, a DVd curriculum with a teacher. It is not expensive either.

[Jessica in KS]

Good thought, Calming Tea! Thanks for the idea. This is actually exactly what she did last year, however, the videos did not have subtitles, so she was dependent upon a hearing/ signing friend to explain it to her. I guess it wasn't working well. I haven't used it, myself, so I am not sure how much she was missing by not being able to hear the videos.

[Merry]

to write well. However, I am pretty strong in English. I used the Calvert curriculum with all of them and subscribed to the teaching service for a while.

 

If I had poor English skills, I probably would have used a self-teaching language program like PACE or LifePac.

 

One thing I did that helped my kids was to have them read their sentences and paragraphs out loud so that they could hear for themselves if they made sense and had good grammar. I made sure that they mingled with our neighbors, friends, and family members to pick up strong spoken language skills so that they could self-correct their compositions after reading them out loud to themselves.

 

I sometimes outsourced the writing to online writing coaches and English classes.

 

I still have a eleven year old son at home to work with and I think he's doing okay.

[laughing lioness]

I would get SOTW CD's, Classical Conversations memory work on CD, IEW language aquisition through poetry on CD. MP has Latin via DVD as well.

[Merry]

because I couldn't listen to them along with the children. It was hard for me to locate the place on the cds to continue if we stopped before they were done.

For English, I did use books on tapes for my high schoolers as they were old enough by then to use them independently. And they all used Chalkdust for math.

The dvds are easier to use but if they're not close captioned or have transcripts, they're worthless to me because I can't answer questions afterwards.

Same with computer programs.

But stories on tapes or whatever are great as long as the kids enjoy listening to them on their own and are not being used in formal schoolwork. And yes, they help with listening comprehension and vocabulary.

Maybe the deaf mother can put the children in Classical Conversations or a writing coop?

Edited September 15, 2012 by Merry
fixed an apostrophe error

[acablue]

Can her husband check over the kids' writing assignments? Or is her English good enough to help them pick out their own errors? Maybe something directed at the student, like Winning With Writing, would be best, along with lots of copywork for the younger kids.

[joannqn]

Excellence in Writing has themed based lessons that have no DVDs. I've been using the US History Based lessons and have preferred them over the TWSS and SWI lessons on DVD. There are two books, the teacher's book and student book. There is a PDF student resource book that is free with the purchase and has to be printed. It's pretty cheap too.