Sign of the Week

This year on my caseload, I have a student who is on the Autism Spectrum, and also deaf.  This student is using a combination of a cochlear implant, a communication device, and sign.  We try to get our students integrated as much as we can within the school community, so I wanted to figure out a way to expose as many people in the school as possible to some sign.  Most people leave the building by passing by my room, so I thought about making a bulletin board with some signs.  I came up with a sign of the week area, and let everyone know to try to take a glance at it every week to learn a new sign that our student uses.

I found a great website called http://www.babysignlanguage.com that had a lot of flashcards of signs. I'm not sure that they are all exact ASL, but so far, they have matched up with what our little guy is doing.

I also looked up the signs on You Tube and made QR codes for each one.  People can scan the code and watch a video of the sign, to get a better idea of how to do each sign.

Here are a few of the posters that I made for future weeks:

I don't own the rights to any of the pictures or videos, so I can't share the actual posters I have made, but I wanted to share the idea with you.  These posters are super easy to make in Power Point.

After I told the staff about what I was doing, I had a lot of great, positive feedback.  I have seen several people, not just staff, stop at the board and check it out.  One day I even saw a Kindergarten student sitting there signing the alphabet.  It reminded me of myself when I was little.  My favorite book was Helen Keller, and there was a sign language alphabet in the back.  I loved figuring out how to sign all kinds of words!

Hope some of you can use this idea too!