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Category Archives: resources
Signs of Christmas
The holidays are a great time to use signs with kids – whether they’re traveling to see relatives, staying up late for midnight mass, or missing naps, holiday times can bring changes, and signing promotes security amid the chaos.
Make this ASL holiday wreath by gluing the hands into I-LOVE-YOU signs, numbers to count the days to Christmas, or letters to spell out your name! Find complete directions at http://www.storytimestuff.net.
Check out this video guide to simple Christmas signs from My Smart Hands, presented by a mom and two kids of different ages – it’s a great chance to see how those little hands actually form the signs.
Make this ASL holiday wreath by gluing the hands into I-LOVE-YOU signs, numbers to count the days to Christmas, or letters to spell out your name! Find complete directions at http://www.storytimestuff.net.
Check out this video guide to simple Christmas signs from My Smart Hands, presented by a mom and two kids of different ages – it’s a great chance to see how those little hands actually form the signs.
Celebrating a Great Partnership: Clerc-Gallaudet Week is December 3-9
At certain times throughout history, fate has brought together people who were able to do great things together, their collaborations pushing them individually to great heights. Lennon and McCartney. Jobs and Wozniak. Twain and Tesla.
Perhaps lesser-known to many hearing Americans is a partnership that happened by fortunate accident but would go on to shape an educational system, a language, and eventually, an entire culture: that of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, founders of the first permanent school for the deaf in the United States.
Laurent Clerc, born December 26, 1785 in the south of France, became deaf as a young child and spent his early years uneducated, with little to no communication with his hearing family members. Finally, when he was twelve years old, an uncle convinced Clerc’s parents to send him to a well-known school for the deaf in Paris, the first public school for the deaf in the world. At the school, Clerc quickly learned French Sign Language, reading, writing, philosophy, mathematics and more – so quickly that after just eight years of schooling he became a tutor and was hired as a teacher one year later. In 1815, Clerc was selected to travel to England with the head of the Paris school for a series of demonstrations of his teaching methods – a trip that would change history.
That’s because in attendance at one of those demonstrations was 
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a hearing man and minister from Hartford, Connecticut who had travelled to England to research deaf education methods for a proposed school for the deaf in the United States. He had originally come to study at the Braidwood School, an institution that focused exclusively on speech and speechreading, but had been frustrated by the Braidwood family’s refusal to share their methods. When he attended the presentation by the French educators, Gallaudet knew that he had found what he needed for the American school. The Frenchmen invited Gallaudet back to Paris with them.
Gallaudet soon ran out of money, and recognized that he still had not learned enough to start the school on his own. He entreated Laurent Clerc to return to the United States with him, and Clerc, moved by the plight of the uneducated deaf children in America, agreed, abandoning the cultured halls of Paris for the wilds of the New World.
On their fifty-two day sea voyage across the Atlantic, Clerc taught Gallaudet French Sign Language, and Gallaudet taught Clerc to read and write English. In 1817, they opened the first permanent school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Some students came from the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard, a community with its own established deaf community and sign language. Most students came from hearing families where they had eked out a few “home signs”, gestures to communicate enough to get by. But all found themselves in a rich community where Clerc’s French Sign Language blended with the signs brought by his students, forming early American Sign Language and the roots of American Deaf Culture as we know it today.
Clerc and Gallaudet went on to establish or help establish schools for the deaf in many other states, and both devoted their lives to deaf education. In December 1974, DC Public Library established Clerc-Gallaudet Week as a way of honoring Clerc and Gallaudet’s birthdays (December 26, 1785 and December 10, 1787, respectively) and promoting library awareness in the deaf community and deaf awareness in the library community.
To learn more about Clerc and Gallaudet, check out these links:
Laurent Clerc, born December 26, 1785 in the south of France, became deaf as a young child and spent his early years uneducated, with little to no communication with his hearing family members. Finally, when he was twelve years old, an uncle convinced Clerc’s parents to send him to a well-known school for the deaf in Paris, the first public school for the deaf in the world. At the school, Clerc quickly learned French Sign Language, reading, writing, philosophy, mathematics and more – so quickly that after just eight years of schooling he became a tutor and was hired as a teacher one year later. In 1815, Clerc was selected to travel to England with the head of the Paris school for a series of demonstrations of his teaching methods – a trip that would change history.
That’s because in attendance at one of those demonstrations was 
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a hearing man and minister from Hartford, Connecticut who had travelled to England to research deaf education methods for a proposed school for the deaf in the United States. He had originally come to study at the Braidwood School, an institution that focused exclusively on speech and speechreading, but had been frustrated by the Braidwood family’s refusal to share their methods. When he attended the presentation by the French educators, Gallaudet knew that he had found what he needed for the American school. The Frenchmen invited Gallaudet back to Paris with them.
Gallaudet soon ran out of money, and recognized that he still had not learned enough to start the school on his own. He entreated Laurent Clerc to return to the United States with him, and Clerc, moved by the plight of the uneducated deaf children in America, agreed, abandoning the cultured halls of Paris for the wilds of the New World.
On their fifty-two day sea voyage across the Atlantic, Clerc taught Gallaudet French Sign Language, and Gallaudet taught Clerc to read and write English. In 1817, they opened the first permanent school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Some students came from the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard, a community with its own established deaf community and sign language. Most students came from hearing families where they had eked out a few “home signs”, gestures to communicate enough to get by. But all found themselves in a rich community where Clerc’s French Sign Language blended with the signs brought by his students, forming early American Sign Language and the roots of American Deaf Culture as we know it today.
Clerc and Gallaudet went on to establish or help establish schools for the deaf in many other states, and both devoted their lives to deaf education. In December 1974, DC Public Library established Clerc-Gallaudet Week as a way of honoring Clerc and Gallaudet’s birthdays (December 26, 1785 and December 10, 1787, respectively) and promoting library awareness in the deaf community and deaf awareness in the library community.
To learn more about Clerc and Gallaudet, check out these links:
- Laurent Clerc: Apostle to the Deaf People of the New World: http://www.gallaudet.edu/clerc_center/welcome/laurent_clerc_the_man.html
- Laurent Clerc (1785-1869): http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/clerc_laurent_7.htm
- Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: http://www.gallaudet.edu/dpn_home/thomas_hopkins_gallaudet.html
- Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/gallaudet-thomas-hopkins3.htm
Signing Helps Young Children Understand Feelings
Halloween is the perfect time to talk about feelings with young children – and American Sign Language is a wonderful way to help children connect visual cues with feeling concepts, to help them develop an understanding of their own feelings as well as empathy for the feelings of others. Here’s a fun song to introduce feeling signs to kids. Extend the activity by drawing a simple pumpkin face on a whiteboard and asking the child to help you draw the appropriate expressions for each feeling.
“Pumpkin Feelings” (Click on the links to see videos of the key signs)
If you’re a happy pumpkin, clap your hands. If you’re a happy pumpkin, clap your hands. If you’re a happy pumpkin, then your face will show us something, so If you’re a happy pumpkin, clap your hands.- If you’re a sad pumpkin, cry some tears…
- If you’re an angry pumpkin, stomp your feet…
- If you’re a scared pumpkin, curl up into a ball…
- If you’re an excited pumpkin, jump up and down…
Find more hands-on signing activities like this one in Little Hands and Big Hands: Children and Adults Signing Together by Kathy MacMillan, photographs by Kristin Brown. (Huron Street Press, 2013).
How Signing Enhances Early Literacy
Excerpted from Little Hands and Big Hands: Children and Adults Signing Together by Kathy MacMillan (Chicago, IL: Huron Street Press, 2013)
Whenever you communicate with your child in an involving way, you are helping her develop early literacy skills. Because signing encourages communication and engagement, it supports early literacy. But that’s not the only way signing helps your child develop language and literacy skills. In her groundbreaking book, Dancing with Words: Signing for Hearing Children’s Literacy (2001), Marilyn Daniels describes her research on using American Sign Language in preschool classrooms with hearing children. More often than not, her research was disrupted when the parents of her control group (a preschool classroom where the teacher was not using sign language with the students) heard about the amazing gains the signing classrooms in the study were making, and insisted that their children be exposed to sign too! She found that hearing preschoolers and kindergarteners in the signing groups achieved significantly higher scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test than those who knew no sign. In addition, teachers in the signing classroom reported that their students were less frustrated, got along better, and were more excited about learning than their previous, non-signing classes.
How did signing with these groups produce such extraordinary results?
- Sign language supports different learning styles. Signs provide a visual cue and give kinesthetic learners, who learn best through physical activity, a way to interact with letters and vocabulary.
- Knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet is an important first step on the road to literacy. Using the manual alphabet with children helps them learn, remember, and use the letters – long before they have developed the fine motor skills to write them clearly.
- As children move into the preschool and early elementary years, knowing signs and the manual alphabet allows them to access two different “memory stores” in their brains for reading, spelling, and vocabulary. For example, if a child cannot identify a letter’s sound, signing it to himself may help jog his memory to make the connection.
- American Sign Language, like any language, stimulates the language centers of the brain, strengthening synaptic connections and preparing them for further language learning.
- Young children tend to be more visually attuned than adults, and so signing to them naturally captures their attention. In addition, our visual sense works best when our eyes are moving, as when one is observing signs.
- The areas of the brain that control movement develop earlier than those that control speech. This is why even six to seven month old babies can produce signs. As children grow up, their motor centers continue to develop ahead of their speech centers, allowing them to express more thoughts more clearly through signs than they can through speech.
- Adults tend to use writing as a way to process and understand information. Young children do not have access to this tool yet, but they can use signs to serve the same function.
- The hands are connected to the brain. Developing the tactile sense (touch) and the kinesthetic sense (movement) helps the different hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another, allowing for more seamless processing of information.
- Before children can understand the abstract shapes of letters, they must first develop their proprioceptive system, or a sense of where they are in space. When a child moves, proprioceptive development is triggered as muscles, joints, and tendons make contact and brain connections develop (Johnson 2007). The movement of signs naturally encourages proprioceptive development.
- Signing in itself seems to be intrinsically motivating for children; as one United Kingdom study reports, “Children’s motivation for acquiring basic signing skills does not appear to stem from interaction with Deaf children or adults as much as from the language itself” (Daniels 2003).
- Signing with children facilitates a sense of play. Play is far more than just simple entertainment – it is the number one way children learn about the world in the first five years of life. Play allows children to make connections between concepts and understand how the pieces of the world fit together – and if children figure these things out for themselves, the resulting brain connections last far longer than if they had received direct instruction.
For more about the benefits of signing with young children, as well as fun signing activities to use with children, see Little Hands and Big Hands: Children and Adults Signing Together by Kathy MacMillan available now!
Stories By Hand with Kathy MacMillan 