Cornerstones Literacy

This page archives past NCAM projects. While the information remains relevant, some resources referenced are no longer available, so links to them have been removed.

Cornerstones is a technology-infused approach to literacy development for early elementary children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Academic experts in literacy and deafness, along with teachers of deaf students helped us develop an instructional approach that is demanding, engaging, research-based, and flexible for use with children who have a range of backgrounds, communication needs, and skills.

We are most concerned with three key areas of literacy:

• Identification of words in print
• In-depth knowledge of words, and
• Story comprehension

An essential element of Cornerstones is a story taken from PBS’s literacy series Between the Lions, complemented by versions of the story in American Sign Language and other visual-spatial systems for communicating with deaf children, such as Signing Exact English and cued speech. Other materials include a hypertext version of the story, an electronic storybook where children can click on a word to see a picture, example, or other meaning; clip art of target words; and supplementary games and activities. A teachers guide includes a day-by-day sequence of rigorous learning objectives and lessons, with recommended instructional practices.

Three complete Cornerstones teaching units– The Fox and the Crow, Click, Clack, Moo and Joseph Had A Little Overcoat– can be downloaded from the the Cornerstones site at pbskids.org. CD’s with the Web site’s resources are available from NCAM. E-mail us at access@wgbh.org for a copy.

Project Funding

Funding was provided by the U.S. Department of Education under grant award #H327A98023 (Phase 1, October 1998 - September 2001) and #H327A10005A (Phase 2, October 2002 - September 2004).

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