SOPHIA AND BOBBY’S STORY OF DISCOVERING A LOVE OF BOOKS

6-year old Sophia and 5-year old Bobby have severe hearing loss. They live with their older sister Charlotte (13), mother Cindy and father Gerald at home in Dublin, Ireland. This is their story.

Sophia and Bobby’s family discovered that they both had hearing loss when they were just babies. It meant the whole family entered a world that they were not prepared for, but were desperate to understand.

Bobby is your typical boisterous little boy. His dream is to be a monster or an alien, and he practices really hard at it. Sophia on the other hand, looks like she will make a great teacher when she grows up.

Despite having hearing aids, they both rely on sign language to give them a voice that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. Because of this, learning to read has been frustrating, because signs and printed words can be very different.

“Not many people know that for a child that is deaf or hard of hearing, reading is affected. Hearing children, they hear through phonetics. They can break a word down in to two or three syllables. Whereas deaf children can’t learn to read like that.” – Cindy, mother to Sophia & Bobby.

StorySign helps children like Sophia and Bobby learn to read by associating words with the sign language that they do understand. It also teaches new phrases to parents who don’t have sign as their first language.

Find out more about how StorySign is helping deaf children learn to read all over the world: www.storysign.com