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  • Welcome to Cued Speech UK > Blog > Education
  • 10 Dec

    A talking point for Plymouth parents

    By:   Cued Speech Blog / Education
    Parents share with each other about raising deaf children

    One of the most valuable things to be able to do as a parent of a deaf child is to meet with other parents in the same situation. Knowing that you are not alone and that there are other families that can offer advice and shed some light on the confusing array of communication choices, hearing aid technologies and educational methods available, can make all the difference. Talking to professionals is a vital part of ensuring you get the best support, but it is just as important to be able meet and talk with parents who know exactly how it feels to raise a deaf child.

    At Eggbuckland Vale Primary School in Plymouth, they know how important it is to enable parents to get together and they have set up a monthly parent’s group which meets in the school’s own hearing support centre, where it is providing inclusive education for eighteen deaf children from nursery age to Year 6. Teacher of the deaf, Sarah Bradley was inspired to set up the group because, as well as understanding the importance of parents talking to each other, she also understands how important early years education is for deaf children and she wants to allow parents to see models of good communication. Sarah hopes to inspire parents to learn to use visual language at home with their families and to support their deaf children’s language for learning; language that will enable their families to thrive and support their deaf children to become literate.

    Story time in BSL with Sharon Saunders and Cued Speech with Kathy Kenny

    Sarah ensures that while parents and deaf children chat in the group, they can also see how language is made visible, and she does this brilliantly – and bilingually. Sarah invites a deaf inclusion worker Sharon Saunders to the group who, as a deaf adult and role model, can demonstrate and teach British Sign Language (BSL); the language of the deaf community. Sarah also invites Kathy Kenny, who is a parent of a deaf child herself and in her role as Cued Speech UK family support practitioner, she is able to present spoken English visually to the group by using and teaching Cued Speech; the key to literacy. Everyone is able to see how BSL and Cued Speech, used together, create a truly bilingual and visual learning environment for the group as they discover together through story-telling and creative activities for the children; and discussions and learning opportunities for the adults.

    Inspiring creativity and making activities sparkle!

    Eggbuckland Vale deaf parent’s group is making sure that families in Plymouth become the experts about their own deaf children. These families are being given to tools to become fully informed and to be able to make the very best choices about their deaf children’s futures.

    If you want to find out more about the Eggbuckland Vale deaf parent’s group, you can contact Sarah by email: [email protected]

    If you have a deaf child or want to learn more about Cued Speech, you can contact Cued Speech UK by phone (01803 712853) or by email ([email protected]). Cued Speech UK would love to see what you have to say!

    05 Dec

    Eggbuckland Vale School is thriving!

    By:   Cued Speech Blog / Education
    Sarah Bradley uses Cued speech to reveal spoken English to deaf children

    Teacher of the deaf, Sarah Bradley’s school has radically changed 

    and deaf children are thriving!

    Sarah is a teacher of the deaf from Eggbuckland Vale Primary School in Plymouth, which provides inclusive education for eighteen deaf children from nursery age to Year 6, in a centre staffed by a whole team of specialist trained support staff, which includes a speech and language therapist. The team all help create a visual language-rich environment, where British Sign Language (BSL) and English are represented equally.

     

    The language gap

    As an experienced teacher of the deaf of four years, Sarah was troubled by the significant language gap which was apparent between the deaf children and their hearing peers during their primary school years. Sarah explains that it is all too common for the centre team to see deaf children arrive at school at the age of 4 or 5 years old, with the language abilities of an 18-month-old hearing child.

    For deaf children, arriving at school for the first time presents a significant challenge, when they are immediately expected to start learning to read and write. They just don’t have the language to be able to do this yet. These children are more often born into hearing families who initially have no ready means to provide their deaf child with a full and expressive language.

    Unwilling to be content to allow these deaf children to miss out on their early years education, fail to achieve full literacy and risk a future of poor outcomes, Sarah and her colleagues were determined to find a way to close the language gap and find a method to help these deaf children build language quickly enough to enable them to firmly establish their literacy skills – the key to their education.

     

    Falling short

    She looked at Visual Phonics by Hand, which she found worked deceptively well initially. When used with BSL and fingerspelling, it allowed Sarah to teach the alphabet and some spelling choices. She used this method for a year with six deaf children who quickly picked it up, due mainly to it being a visual method – using gestures – which the deaf children immediately responded to.

    Buoyed by this initial success, Sarah was surprised and frustrated to find the method fell short when she wanted to help the children blend sounds – to bring together consonants and vowels to create meaning, by forming words and sentences. The children just couldn’t understand. Visual Phonics by Hand can only show one sound at a time and it didn’t give them an understanding of how spoken words are actually formed; that words are made from strings of sounds blended together and how mastering this understanding leads in turn to English spelling choices.

    How then do you make spoken English visible and our spelling system understandable for deaf children?

    Exploring spelling choices

    The Solution

    Little over six months ago, while attending their local Children’s Hearing Services Working Group meeting (CHSWG), Sarah and her colleague, and fellow teacher of the deaf, Vicky Lowther both listened with piqued interest to a presentation about Cued Speech. Here, to their amazement, was a system which revealed the whole of spoken language manually and allows deaf people to see all of what anyone using it is saying. This was definitely the solution to her challenge.

    Since their discovery, Sarah and Vicky have transformed the hearing support centre at Eggbuckland Vale so that staff members are learning how to reveal the whole English language visually through Cued Speech – used equally alongside BSL – to be able to provide a truly bilingual environment for the children. These deaf children are being encouraged to use their dominant sense ‘vision’ to learn to read and write spoken English.

     

    Remarkable progress

    In just the short space of time after Sarah and Vicky introduced Cued Speech to their school, the outlook for their deaf children has been transformed. Their deaf children are making remarkable and accelerated progress with their literacy. Children who arrive with behavioural difficulties and a paucity of language are immersed in and captivated by a world of visual language – both BSL and English through Cued Speech – which enables the children to thrive.

    Sarah gives the example of D who she says didn’t fit in when he first came to her. Using Cued Speech to immediately get D started, means he is now excitedly writing meaningful sentences in English – a language, only a short time ago, hidden from him altogether. His success is fuelling his desire to know more, and Sarah says, ‘he now sees himself as a learner – he knows he can succeed’.

     

    The next step

    Not content with being satisfied with the centre’s achievements, Sarah is determined to take on her next challenge. She has set up a monthly parent’s group, where she hopes parents of deaf children can learn how to prepare their children for school. If the parents learn how to reveal their own spoken language to their deaf children through Cued Speech, these children will not only feel more included in their own families, but they will also be arriving at school with all the language they need to start learning to read and write, from day one.

    If you want to find out more about the Eggbuckland Vale deaf parent’s group, you can contact Sarah by email: [email protected]

    If you have a deaf child or want to learn more about Cued Speech, you can contact Cued Speech UK by phone (01803 712853) or by email ([email protected]). Cued Speech UK would love to see what you have to say!

    Debbie Baker, Assistant head for Inclusion and Teachers of the Deaf, Sarah Bradley and Vicky Lowther
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