I teach elementary age deaf and hard-of-hearing children and I have to say they loved this book. They thought seeing a deaf student as the main character in a book was something they could relate to. I used it in my class to talk about the different types of schools deaf children could go to, also how they could become a teacher for the deaf one day. The extra pictures with simple signing sentences were also fun to learn. My favorite, teaching the kids to sign Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

Moses Goes to School is a book written for children, and its language is well suited to informing the understandings of hearing children. Far from being a linguistic primer in the morphology of American Sign Language written for college students and professors, it is instead a wonderful for way for children to physically interact with literature. It is certain that Millman was considering the linguistic development and understanding of children and their language when writing the book. From a teacher's and linguistic researcher's perspective, this book is extremely stimulating and socially valuable piece of a small literature on children and ASL.

For teachers, this book, and others by Millman (Moses Goes to the Circus, Moses Goes to a Concert) allow developing thinkers (primarily 6-9) to understand language from a new perspective, and to have a new form of language that they can share with peers. In addition, sharing this book with a classroom allows teachers to use sign language to manage a classroom, and can give a classroom its own character and signature style.

This book is full of inaccuracies about Deaf culture and ASL and is probably only enjoyable by people who don't know any better. As someone trained in the linguistics of signed languages, I feel the need to educate consumers before purchasing this book. One major problem is a line in the book which notes that the Deaf students need to study reading and writing English because it is "like a different language" from ASL. It is not LIKE a different language, It IS a different language! An illustration in this book shows a letter which a student "wrote in ASL." ASL has no written form. It is possible to write a "gloss" -- a word-for-word translation -- of ASL, but even this is not what is portrayed in the illustration. The "ASL" letter contains words such as contractions -- which would *never* be used in a gloss and are difficult for Deaf adults to use correctly, let alone an elementary school student -- and words for which there are no direct corresponding signs. One MAJOR problem that I had was with the lowercase writing of the word "deaf." The word written in lowercase is meant to mean the audiological conditition. However, the meaning meant in the book is that of "culturally Deaf," one who uses sign language and is part of a rich community of language and culture. This would be like describing me as an "american." Do yourself a favor and don't buy this book.