(Article obtained from the Jan, 2012 Newsletter)

By Lorna Irwin, parent and IDHV Secretary

The promised coming of "The Hobbit" to the big screen had our family remembering how Mom left Tolkien reeling in his grave after reading it aloud with on-the-fly simultaneous signed English translation (more later.)  The hearing kid (now adult) who was subjected to this imperfect rendering remarked that "Reading time was glorious."

Reading time!  That hour or so before bedtime when I read to my kids, everything from simple picture books to longer classic children's literature.  For my deaf daughter, it was a chance to introduce new vocabulary, new concepts and information, as well as for entertainment.  It was a means for me to learn new vocabulary, too; I'd do my homework ahead of time with a sign language dictionary and write tiny notes to myself (on post-it notes if the book was from the library, and once the book returned to the library, the post-it notes went up on the kitchen cupboards for review.)  We've all heard or read about the myriad benefits of reading to children; there are also benefits for the parent, and more so for the parent whose child is deaf or hard of hearing.  A simple children's book provides a script for practicing your own communication skills, whatever approach you are using with your child; it also gives you a chance to introduce modes of communication you may not use in daily conversation.  Your child will ask for reruns of favorite books, so you'll get even more practice.

Some things I learned along the way:  Preparation helps!  Even for a straight read-aloud in your native language, being familiar with the story before you start enhances your rendition... and it helps to anticipate where you can stop and know that the kids will be able to fall asleep, but still be eager to find out what happens next.  (Leave them at a real cliff-hanger, and they may be spotted reading the book for themselves.  This is not a bad thing.)

Keep on reading as long as you can; don't stop when they are reading for themselves.  They still enjoy it. (One week sometime after we'd finally ended nightly reading sessions, we had one of my daughter's classmates staying with us.  She was visually-impaired and did not have with her any of her specialized equipment for reading, so I did what I could to alleviate boredom for her by reading a couple of books aloud.  I noticed my hearing son sitting quietly behind my chair, listening to books I wouldn't have thought would be of the slightest interest to a ten-year-old boy.)

You never know what literature will appeal to your children, so read widely.  It took me a long time to recognize that my daughter truly enjoyed non-fiction; an early clue was the "Eskimo village" (pile of scrap lumber) she erected in the back yard after a book about the far north.  One of the biggest hits of my career in reading was The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks, which is just as silly as it sounds.  I was ready to move on to something with more substance, but my kids demanded the sequel.

Make use of true-to-the-story film adaptations (captioned if possible!) of books, and books written to follow the film script (Disney is particularly good at this, putting out kids' books at more than one reading level.)

I once used a pause button to sign the captions of an entire PBS kids' series to my just-beginning-to-read daughter.

And a final word about Tolkien:  The first chapters were fine.  Then we met the elves and the language got more complex, the sentence structure inverted, and the going got rough.  We persevered until the end, whereupon Mom announced that both kids really ought to read this one for themselves as she'd made a total hash of it, and that there was a long sequel she wasn't even going to attempt.  They did so, both books.