Moses Goes to School

I teach elementary age deaf and hard-of-hearing children and I have to say they loved this book. They thought seeing a deaf student as the main character in a book was something they could relate to. I used it in my class to talk about the different types of schools deaf children could go to, also how they could become a teacher for the deaf one day. The extra pictures with simple signing sentences were also fun to learn. My favorite, teaching the kids to sign Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

Moses Goes to School is a book written for children, and its language is well suited to informing the understandings of hearing children. Far from being a linguistic primer in the morphology of American Sign Language written for college students and professors, it is instead a wonderful for way for children to physically interact with literature. It is certain that Millman was considering the linguistic development and understanding of children and their language when writing the book. From a teacher's and linguistic researcher's perspective, this book is extremely stimulating and socially valuable piece of a small literature on children and ASL.For teachers, this book, and others by Millman (Moses Goes to the Circus, Moses Goes to a Concert) allow developing thinkers (primarily 6-9) to understand language from a new perspective, and to have a new form of language that they can share with peers. In addition, sharing this book with a classroom allows teachers to use sign language to manage a classroom, and can give a classroom its own character and signature style.