How frustrating it must be as a parent to have your deaf child come home and have no idea what has just happened to them for the last seven hours. The child may do their best to communicate their day but many of them have JUST learned the vocabulary themselves and reproducing them once they get home for mom and dad is difficult to say the least.
One idea that I used that was very successful was a daily journal that consisted of digital pictures of activities that happened throughout the day. I would keep a large piece of white construction paper up on the easel near our calendar area. We would begin writing on it during our daily calendar time. As we went through calendar, we would write the date and the weather on the top of that paper. Then as different activities happened throughout our day, a picture would be printed off and would appear on the paper. The students would then have to assists in adding a caption to the picture describing IN WORDS what the class was doing in the pictures.
Besides being a nice way of teaching the concept of summarizing, we had a communication tool that went between home and school. At the end of the day, that large piece of paper was set on the copy machine and reduced in size to about 60 percent. This made the page large enough to still read, yet much small enough to carry home. The students had assisted in the creation of the captions, and now they had a visual aid to help with their retelling of their day.
A Signing Savvy addition would be to print 3-5 signs from the day and include them with the paper. This way both the students and their parents would have instant access to these signs and will be able to use them in the discussion of the day's events.
