New Learnings

I've recently taken up learning sign language and as a way to practice I started using it in the classroom when speaking to my students. At first this was solely for selfish reasons. I wanted to hone my sign language skills, and there is no fear when practicing in front of kindergarteners. They love everything I do because they are five and everyone loves their teacher when they are five. In addition, by learning some signs and finger spelling my students would be able to communicate and connect with those in the Deaf Community, who often feel isolated from the hearing community. We have a couple of deaf students at our school and a few that are hard of hearing, and I felt that it was important for my kids to be able to communicate and include these students when they interact with them.

Even though my incorporation of sign language into daily classroom activities was for my own reasons I have since found that it is an incredibly useful teaching strategy. My entire career I have worked with ELL kids, so I am constantly talking and teaching with my hands. However, by using sign language, instead of random hand movements coinciding with what I am saying now it is consistent signs and movements that represent the words that I am speaking. Even if a kid doesn't understand that words, he or she may be able to gather understanding from the signs. Sign language helps to create a bridge for those learning English.

Sign language is great for all learners too, not just the ELL. Sign language is a visual and kinesthetic language. By teaching the ASL alphabet my students now have a visual and hands-on representation of letters. Also, a lot of the time teacher directions are solely oral. By simultaneously signing while I give directions it helps to give an extra support to my students in understanding what they are expected to do. One way I have seen that this has been helpful is during assessments. In Kindergarten all assessment are performance based and are given one to one. At the beginning of the quarter I gave my students an assessment on comparing numbers. My expectation was that a lot of students wouldn't do too well on the assessment and I would have to reteach the concept later on and retest a lot of the students. During all of the lessons a majority of the students struggled with the concept. Comparing numbers is a difficult concept for little minds and they especially struggle with the meaning of "less" when comparing numbers or quantities. To my surprise most of the students in my class got a 100% on the assessment. When I reflected on the results afterwards I realized that the difference between administering the test this year and lasts years was that this time I signed all of the directions. I couldn't help but wonder if the extra support of using sign language helped my students be successful.

Sign language also is a great strategy for classroom management. I love using nonverbal cues in my classroom. It keeps the noise level down and minimizes interruptions. For years I have taught my kids to ask for water or to use the bathroom using signs. When they want water they hold up a "W". When they need to use the bathroom they hold up the finger spelling for "t" and rotate it back and forth (This is the sign for bathroom/toilet in ASL). My goal this year is to be able to give my students a simple set of directions using only signs. By omitting verbal directions and only giving signs students are then forced to "listen" with their eyes. Let's face it, a lot of us "listen" to directions without really listening. The same is true with Kindergarteners. However, when communicating with signs you HAVE to look at the person. It requires a lot more focus on the "speaker" to understand what is being said.

Learning sign language and teaching it to my students has been one of the best things I have done for my students. Not only is it a beautiful language, but also it is a great teaching strategy for multiple reasons. Most of all though, I believe that it will help my students to become more well-rounded human beings.