Foundations for Literacy (FFL) is a one-of-a-kind, evidence-based intervention designed specifically for preschool and kindergarten-aged children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Targeted learning objectives include vocabulary, narrative skills, alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, and reading decodable words and short connected text. Each lesson includes strategies for differentiating instruction using fun, multi-sensory, age-appropriate, integrated activities. The lesson plans include guidance on how teachers can adapt lessons depending children’s use of sound-based or visual-based reading strategies. Classroom teachers typically implement Foundations for Literacy an hour a day every week for the school year, Itinerant teachers teach the parts of the lesson plans that are consistent with their students’ learning goals.

This two day program has been adapted for the Australian context and provides a dynamic learning environment for participants either in-person or online.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

• explain the difference between code-focused and meaning-focused literacy skills and identify instructional activities for each,
• determine if a student should use sound-based phonology or visual-based phonology and phonics (fingerspelling-based) phonology, phonics and bilingual strategies for reading connected text,
• teach letter-sound correspondence and/or letter-handshape correspondence and teach the corresponding word recognition strategies, and
• use dialogic reading strategies to support students’ pragmatic and expressive language development.
  Foundations