The project: “Teaching Signed Languages as a First Language” (SIGN FIRST) is based on the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Universal Design for Learning, the Paris Declaration, data driven results and recent best practices for the development of literacy in students with hearing impairments.International studies show that the vast majority (90-95%) of deaf children have hearing parents and they grow up without having access to the language of their parents or caretakers. With minimal signed and/or spoken linguistic input in the early years, the children are deprived the opportunity to acquire a first language and hence to adequately develop communicative and world knowledge.The most recent study of Hrastinski & Wilbur (2016) on the effects of sign language proficiency on reading comprehension skills and academic achievement of deaf and hard of hearing students suggested that students highly proficient in sign language outperformed their less proficient peers in nationally standardized measures of reading comprehension, English language use, and mathematics. They showed that sign language proficiency was the single variable significantly predicting results on all outcome measures. This study strongly supports the aims of our proposed project by focusing on sign language fluency.Our proposed project aims at achieving the bilingual literacy development of Deaf and Hard of Hearing children so they can be educated in an effective inclusive school environment.The SIGN FIRST project specifically aims to fill existing skills' gaps by the development of a teaching curriculum and educational materials for teaching European Sign Languages to deaf students as a first language. Additionally, the project aims at developing sign language assessment instruments for this target group.The age group of the students that the proposed project targets are children that attend Kindergarten to 2nd grade of primary school (K-2), ages from 4 to 7 years old. However the programme can be implemented with deaf children in higher grades as well.Seven participants from four countries are part of the Project. One Educational policy Institute, one Research and Development Center, two Universities, two Schools of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and one private sector company, all experts in the education of the deaf and Sign Language, constitute the Strategic Partnership: 1. The Institute of Educational Policy (IEP), Greece.2. The Dutch Sign Centre, Nederlands Gebarencentrum (NGC), Nederlands.3. The University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education Zurich (HfH), Switzerland.4. European University (EUN), Cyprus.5. Kindergarten for the Deaf and hard of hearing of Argyroupolis (KindArg), Greece.6. Kindergarten and Special elementary school for the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing of Likovrisi- Pefki (ElemLP), Greece.7. Habilis (HB), Greece.A wide and flexible range of activities are planned in order to implement innovative practices1. Sign Language curricula, common modules (including e-modules).2. Learning, teaching, training, materials and methods, pedagogical approaches and tools for teaching European Sign Languages as a first language.3. Peer-learning, workshops in three countries.4. Information, guidance, coaching and counselling activities for parents and teachers.5. Surveys, comparative analyses, evidence-gathering for state of the art SL teaching.6. Networking, promotion and awareness-raising activities in the EU and internationally The activities are based on participatory methods that:• Offer space for interaction of participants (deaf and hearing), sharing of ideas, avoiding passive listening / seeing.• Empower the participants to contribute to the activities with their own knowledge and skills.• Ensure that participants have influence over project decisions, not just involvement.• Offer participants the opportunity to identify common values with persons from different cultures (Deaf and Hearing, different countries)• Promote the respect of cultural diversity of Deaf and Hearing, signed and spoken languages.By the end of the 29 months project, it is expected that the following outcomes will be obtained in alignment with project objectives:1. Collect and document European Best Practices and make them available to all.2. Develop evidence based tools to raise the quality of Sign Language teaching.3. Develop systematic transfer of knowledge in teaching European Signed Languages as a first language.4. Share common teaching strategies, practices and educational material locally as well as internationally