The effectiveness of using American Sign Language (ASL) handshape stories to teach word recognition in whole stories using a descriptive case study approach was explored. Four profoundly deaf children ages 7 to 8, enrolled in a self-contained deaf education classroom in a public school in the south participated in the story time five-week intervention. The teacher utilized a total communication philosophy. For this five-week, 30 minutes per day, meaning-based, whole story intervention, the researcher developed 31 stories presented in both English print and signed in ASL on a DVD. Accompanying each of 31 stories on the DVD was a PowerPoint lesson that provided a line-by-line translation of the story with ASL expansions and fingerspelling for targeted words. Each story was 8 to 10 sentences, followed a simplified story grammar, McCormick & Mason's (1990) design for emergent reading primers, and contained words from Johns (1997) Reading Inventory. Group 1 stories (ASL-NHR) had no ASL handshape rhyme. Group 2 stories (ASL-HR) had handshape rhyme and Group 3 stories (ASL-EWF) had its English equivalent using word families. Children were assessed with a pretest of the 168 words (Johns, 1997), and then assessed with a posttest after each story. All children made gains in word recognition abilities with all stories with a slight increase in word recognition scores with the ASL stories with handshape rhyme. The data is interpreted using theories of sign bilingualism and the Cognitive and Interactive view of reading. Recommendations are made for future research and practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]