Assess the student's present level of knowledge about language, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading and writing. Typical assessment tools may need to be modified to allow for nonverbal responses such as pointing, gesturing, sign language or drawing pictures. Teachers need to ascertain the student's level of receptive language and discover what nonverbal methods of communication the student can use. It will also be important to find out what types of questions or directions are meaningful to the student and whether there are concurrent difficulties with vision, hearing, auditory perception, auditory processing or other receptive skills. Use the evaluation information to design a communication board or similar tool for use in reading class. Offer a means to respond to yes/no questions, to indicate understanding and so forth.
Introduce new words by using concrete methods. Demonstrate action verbs, illustrate nouns and adjectives and so forth. If possible, teach the manual sign to match the written and spoken word. Have the student show word recognition by matching the printed version to pictures, sign illustrations and objects. Put relevant words on the communication board.
Teach phonics skills using pictures of key words for initial sounds. Teach manual signs for the letters in conjunction with letter sounds. Match key word pictures to letters, spell phonetically regular words using key word pictures as well as letters without the key word picture cues, and have the child indicate where a target sound falls in the sequence of the word's sounds. For example, have the child use small tokens or counters such as pennies or toothpicks to indicate sounds heard within a word. Have the student indicate that the /t/ sound is at the end of "cat" by displaying two counters and the "T" card in a row. In this way the student can show awareness that there are two sounds that are not /t/ followed by one that is /t/. To show where the /t/ sound is in "attic," the student would use a counter for the /a/, the "T" card for the /t/ sound, then two more counters for the sounds of the "i" and the "c."
Develop comprehension skills using pictures that can be matched to words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and stories. The student can also show understanding of words and ideas by arranging word cards into coherent sentences and sequencing sentences into paragraphs. Have the student use manual signs or the communication device to explain the meaning of a passage, or allow the student to write answers to comprehension questions that might be answered orally by their non-disabled peers.