VISUAL COUNTING - WHAT WORKS

I feel that it is very appropriate at this time to include the observations I have made with teaching counting to my children. However, as you read this, keep in mind that our children did not have hearing aids in their first years of school.  So while they have only mild impairments, they will not have the same outcome as other mildly impaired children who had hearing aids.  You may also consider that many severely/profoundly deaf children when aided will have hearing scores measuring on the low side of mild.  As a result, I believe that it is highly likely, my children's abilities in school reflect this population.

Alex was really our 'guinea pig'.  We sent him to school his first year of kindergarten and just expected that he was going to learn.  What was I thinking?!  So at the end of his first year of kindergarten he was counting to 3, despite being in the classroom counting to 100 with his peers everyday from day one til the end.  He was held back; I worked with him diligently over the summer and he was counting to 4 at the beginning of his second year of kindergarten.  At the end of that year, he was counting solidly to 9. I had begun to try to figure out better methods of teaching him how to count and found the most effective way was to have a number chart in front of him and have him count while looking at the numbers in front of him.  At the end of first grade he was counting to 29.  But he was saying fiveteen for fifteen.  As he started 2nd grade, he had a new teacher who required him to say 'fifteen', despite his speech impairment.  This was enough of a change to make his emerging abilities fall apart.  The counting string was no longer natural for him; he had to  think about what he was saying and began making mistakes at 13.  It should also be noted, because of the change in pronunciation, he was now saying 'itee' for 13,15,16.  So many times he would be on 13 and then jump to 17 OR 16 and go back to 14.  The US Department of Education Office of SPED states on their website, studentprogress.org that mistakes in pronunciation due to a speech impairment should be accepted.

Diego is a different story.  Much of what I needed to know I learned through Alex, so with Diego I started to count with him a year before he started kindergarten.  We started in the little preschool books which had a set of objects to count and then a set of lines to write that number on several times. We went up to 15 in those books, then I started to make worksheets with objects to be counted on them starting at 15 and each week adding more objects to the amount, to progressively work him up to 30.  He was counting up to 20 then I had Levi and stopped for about 8 weeks.  He dropped down to 14, and it took him about 2 months to recoup the numbers back up to 20 again.  So he started school counting to 20.  When he started school, I kept counting with him for the first few months, but when we put our house up for sale, I had to keep teaching supplies hidden and I could not maintain consistency (because they were not out to remind me).  With only the help he was receiving from daily counting as a class in school, he was only counting to 14 again at Christmas break.

I have found the most important tools to help my children have been:

1) The use of personally created worksheets that gradually increase the demand of counting

2) Using a 100's chart to have the children point to each number as they count

3) Counting along with them, but only saying the numbers that they miss.  I found it very important for me to anticipate the numbers I knew they would miss, so that there was no breakdown in continuity.  Eventually they pick up the numbers that you are saying for them, which extends their counting ability.
4) Please note, that corrections of pronunciation should not be made unless you know the child is capable of pronouncing it better.  They will self correct their pronunciations as they become more aware of the counting string.  If not, you can always correct the pronunciation (if it bothers you) once there skills are nearly mastered.

5) Daily practice with attention to detail is a requirement.

LEARNING STYLES OF HEARING IMPAIRED VS HEARING INDIVIDUALS

Researchers were interested to know if Hearing Impaired individuals tend to have poor number skills from the beginning and if not then when the break down occurred.  What they found was that young Hearing Impaired children actually had stronger number skills than their hearing peers, but as it is expected that children develop their counting skills, the hearing impaired children quickly drop behind.


Research has shown that Hearing Impaired (HI) individuals and Hearing individuals have different learning styles.    The HI population code information visually, whereas hearing individuals code information phonologically (or sound based).  These two learning styles have different uses.  Visual memory is useful for recalling location and phonological memory is good for recalling order or serial recall.  In addition to this studies have indicated that HI children have the same ability as hearing children to recall items, but if there is a specific order the items must be recalled in (serial recall), then HI children would perform worse than their hearing peers. 


Counting is by far the most difficult task that a hearing impaired child needs to accomplish.   If we take the skill of counting and classify it by these learning styles, it is obviously a task of serial recall of phonological items; in order to count you must recall the number words in a fixed order.  So the task of counting is more difficult for HI children than the hearing, regardless of if it is represented visually or orally, because it requires serial recall.  The fact that it is orally based just complicates things further.


 Not all languages are equal when it comes to learning to count.  Japanese and Chinese are among the easiest languages to learn to count in.  Counting in English requires memorization of the numbers 1-20 and then applying  the use of counting rules after that.  It was determined that when a child is able to count to 60, they are likely able to count to 99.  So a solid counter would be one who is able to count to 60.  In 1998 Nunes and Moreno found that HI children in 2nd and 3rd grade were still not able to count to 60, where as hearing children were able to count to 60 early in their 1st grade year if not sooner.  They also found that many HI 4th graders were still unable to count to 60.  The patterns of mistakes that HI children seemed to make were related to phonological confusion.  For example: 15, 16, 17, 18, 81, 82, etc., which error is not found in hearing children.


It was determined that it is very likely that hearing impaired children start to fall behind simply because they lack sufficient experience counting (pg 48).


(This information can be found on pages  25-30 & 48 of Teaching Mathematics to deaf Children by Nunes)