Sign Language Integrated into a Language Arts Class

Students had several opportunities to understand what it is like to be deaf and to try to empathize the meaning of the disability.

7th Grade students in this collaborative class had the opportunity to recite the pledge of allegiance in Sign Language. They are reading The Miracle Worker by William Gibson and are doing many constructivist methodologies intertwined within it!

Creating artwork from text depicting what the stage would look like was an assignment for one class who was reciting the play in front of the room. Another class studying the same thing had the speech pathologist give an incredible lesson on deafness and taught them sign. Not only did they learn the pledge, but they also learned their classmates middle names by deciphering the sign language they used.

Students were thus able to learn something new about their classmates as they were directed back to learning about a book and their feelings as well as the feelings of the characters in the book as they live vicariously through the many fashioned exercises they are given.

I thought the lesson was great and stimulating for the students. It was getting them excited about the literature. Their teacher who observed most of the speech pathologists lesson added higher-level cognitive comprehension questions relating to an aspect of the story when she saw fit. The students answered the comprehension question in sign language.

This is not only a totally great way to get kids interested in literature but also a great way to teach about others with disabilities first hand.

In the technology field, we could extend the lesson further by showing the students the Pledge of Allegiance in Sign in a multimedia format.