Chart Share from Jeremy, 3/2/2000
Chart Ancestry: Jeremy-->Tim Zeuschner-->Ian Spence-->Ann Dell Duncan-->Og
Meet Jeremy, who is in Grade 6 at the American School for the Deaf, and has been using CyberSlate for the past two years, mostly at home. Richard McManus shared his story on the SCList a couple of days ago, and Jeremy and his mother agreed to share his charts. Jeremy has become a fast, accurate touch typer, and in this picture, he is blazing through his arithmetic facts in CyberSlate. Through his industry in CyberSlate, he has earned between $30 and $50 per month, (beating scores and passing levels) and has bought himself a Super-Nintendo and a few games.

Jeremy has been working hard on Reading, and is presently reading stories in the Jamestown Reading Series, Book 2 (Grade 5.) This is hard work for Jeremy, because English is his second language. Jeremy is profoundly deaf, uses total communication, prefers American Sign Language, and when he is doing his reading fluencies, he is lightning quick in his use of ASL and Signed English. His mother and father (both hearing) are also adept at signing, and they keep score.
 Jeremy's typing chart. When he reached the top level, he asked to repeat the exercise at a higher passing rate (55 wpm.)

Jeremy began reading fluencies using Bucks County materials (Sopris West) in Summer 1997. He passed all of the sheets by January 1999, and we moved him into the Jamestown (sight vocabulary based) Timed Readings, Book 2. He chose the Literature series rather than the Science, so he has been meeting many idioms and metaphors. Whenever he begins a new sheet, his mother or father teaches him the meaning of each new expression. Often when he understands the expression he comes up with his own ASL or Signed English metaphor for it.
 Jeremy's chart of reading from September. He averaged 2 readings per day on the days that he read. Both he and his mother dropped the reading for a while partly because of their discouragement with slow progress.
 January was a better month for reading. Jeremy's fast passing of levels was because he tackled each story 3 to 5 times per day, every day. His passing rate has been 130 words per minute.
In his post on the SCListServer, Richard asked for ideas or proven solutions that might help Jeremy. "Overall, deaf individuals rarely learn to read beyond the fourth grade level. As of last testing (Spring 1999 on the Stanford Achievement Test, because it is the only Deaf Normed test available) Jeremy scored Grade 3.3 in reading Comprehension, Grade 2.2 vocabulary." He mentioned that Jeremy's mother had thought about teaching him Latin.

Lynn Woolsey, and Ph.D. student at OSU replied. She is studying behavior analysis, and was a teacher and administrator of the deaf. She said "Teaching Latin to deaf students has been done with some success, [but] not if they do not have a solid language base in either ASL or English." Lynn, if you are reading this, what is the measure for a solid language base in ASL? Does completing Bucks County constitute a solid language base in English?

We (Jeremy's mother and Ian) are thinking of using Engelmann's Morphographic Spelling lists to help Jeremy learn prefixes, roots, and suffixes so he can figure approximate meanings of latin root based words himself - but we will welcome better ideas!