Karen Hardwicke with Jack Signs Colours!

JACK Riley was two when his mother taught him his first word in sign language: car.

The deaf toddler repeated it back to her immediately.

Fast forward to now and those early moments have inspired a series of books, appropriately titled Jack Signs.

Karen Hardwicke, his mother, said: “I remember the day when I decided we’re going to sign and we literally went out into the street and I realised that it’d be good to start with something that he was interested in.

“So we went to a car and I looked in the dictionary of signs and found the sign ‘car’, pointed to it, signed car, and Jack copied it. It was so emotional. I just can’t tell you. It was that immediate, like with spoken language.

“It can be difficult for the deaf child to process and produce spoken words whereas this was immediate: I signed ‘car’, he signed ‘car’, and there was a connection.”

Ms Hardwicke, from Offord Road near Caledonian Road, became a teacher to deaf children after Jack was born. She started writing books in 2014, always featuring deaf characters.

Jack Riley as a young boy

The mother-of-three said she “always knew” before having children she wanted to be teacher, but having a deaf child was transformative and led to her training for the role of a teacher of the deaf (TOD).

“It was such a radical experience – it still makes me feel emotional now,” she said of those early days raising Jack, who is now 28.

“I felt like I learned so much from him and it’s so corny, but you literally think ‘I’ve learned so much from this’. I can kind of channel it into my teaching,” she said.

Having worked at Laycock Primary School for just under five years, she left at Christmas to take on a temporary role at a deaf school in Haringey before starting a new role as an advice and guidance officer at the National Deaf Children’s Society in Old Street.

The second in the Jack Signs series is about signing colours; the first book introduced readers to Jack, his hearing sister and their mum. Other subjects planned in the series include farm animals and bedtime.

A launch for latest book is due to take place on March 23 at the independent bookshop Ink@84 in Highbury Park.

With British Sign Language (BSL) being offered as a GCSE for the first time in 2025, Ms Hardwicke said her books are somewhat “zeitgeisty” and her publisher, Avid Language Books, said it has seen a spike in sales in recent months.

“That’s something which I would so love as a campaign to get behind because how amazing is that?” she said of the new GCSE course.

She added: “We believe that limits should not be put on deaf children. They should reach for the stars and be given the support that enables them to achieve on par with their typically hearing children.”

Currently, there are 50,000 deaf children in the UK and even though deafness isn’t a learning disability, deaf children typically underachieve at school.