Moses Goes to School Book Review

Millman, Isaac. 2000. Moses goes to School. New York: Farrar, Straus.

The book, Moses Goes to School, by Isaac Millman is about a young boy that is deaf going to his first day of school after summer vacation. Moses talks about what he does on his first day back. He signs with other children out on the playground and all the way into the classroom. When his teacher, Mr. Samuels enters the classroom they notice he has a boom box. Moses discusses his pen pal letters that he writes as he learns ASL. The book shows the letter that Moses wrote out and then what the letter looks like when he types it on the computer and makes the corrections to it. After that the class learns the song, “Take me out to the Ball Game”. Moses then goes home to his mother and dog at his apartment.

After reading this book I thought that this was a good story about the disability of being deaf for children. The book talked about the first day of school after summer vacation which children always seem to look forward to. It also had side pictures of ways to sign different things that Moses did throughout the book. When the children learned the new song the signs were in the book for other children to learn as well. I thought that this was a very important part to the book especially because if you were trying to read this book to a child that had a hearing impairment and were not sure how to sign there are certain areas in the book that you could look at to sign with the child. This would give the reader a chance to learn sign language along with the child being read to. This is a good book for children to learn about the disability of being deaf because it shows how this child lived a normal life with this disability. I think children sometimes have a misconception that if a person has a disability they are not able to live a life like someone without a disability and this book corrects that misconception to children.