Development of Sign N' Say
Ellen Brigger shares how the Sign n’ Say class began:
(written Fall, 2003)
“About six years ago, a family approached the school about enrolling their 5 year old daughter. Their child was hearing but had apraxia and could not speak. I still remember the mother’s words. She told us that she wanted her daughter to learn sign language because, “At this point, I’m not so concerned about speech; I just want her to have language. I want her to be able to communicate her thoughts and feelings.” That little girl was Hannah. At first, I was a little uneasy about this assignment. I had never heard of apraxia and I was not sure how to approach this challenge. Sometime in mid-September we went on a field trip with the other classes. Something had happened on the bus coming back to school that upset Hannah very much. As the children were getting off the bus, Hannah was crying and struggling to get words out to tell me what had happened. I will never forget her little face, how desperate she was to communicate her feelings to me. However, nothing but a jumble of unintelligible sounds that I could not interpret came out. For two hours, we sat on the front lawn of our campus while she cried and beat her hands on the ground in her frustration. She had so many feelings to express, so much she wanted to say and the words would not come. I cried with her and I made her a promise that somehow I would find a way for her to tell me her feelings. After speaking with her parents, it was agreed that I would do nothing but teach her sign language for one month. The results were amazing. The crying spells stopped and I soon had a happy little girl in my classroom expressing her feelings and thoughts to me as her signing vocabulary grew. One day in late October, she said her first intelligible word to me “bat”. Hannah was with me for three years. As time went by she began to voice and sign, then she began dropping signs and signed only when she was “stuck”. Today, Hanna is mainstreamed in a parochial school.
Two years after Hannah came to St. Rita’s, the preschool brought over a
tiny boy with dark brown hair and eyes and a big smile, who also had apraxia. Christopher was having problems in the preschool and they
wondered if he might do better in my classroom, which was smaller and had fewer students. At this time, I had five students in my K-2 classroom. Christopher was with us in the morning and, in the afternoons, he went to a program with his school district. I assigned Beth, my classroom aide, the task of teaching Christopher sign language. He learned sign language quickly. However, because of the motor difficulties he had from the apraxia, he had difficulty making many of the signs. This was remedied by one of the deaf kindergartners. This boy sat down every day with Christopher and helped him adapt some of the signs. Like Hannah, Christopher soon became fluent in sign language. Some of the signs were adapted but the deaf children in the class understood them. We referred to his adapted signs as Christopher’s “apraxic accent.”
He learned his letters and was beginning to recognize words. Soon, he was reading. His school district, however, did not feel he was progressing because he could not demonstrate skill with cutting or writing. I observed him in his public school classroom and saw that he was unable to participate in that class. He had an interpreter but the children in that preschool classroom were not communicating with him through the interpreter. Even the teacher did not sign. It was a stressful environment for him. Eventually, Christopher’s parents decided to enroll him at St. Rita’s full time. Since he could not write because of fine motor problems due to the apraxia, I began giving him words on cards that he could choose and glue onto paper to express what he wanted to say in print. At first it appeared that he was not constructing any meaningful writing. The cards seemed to be randomly scattered on the page. Then, one day, as I watched him gluing the cards on paper, I realized that he was signing a sentence to himself first and then selecting the correct words to glue on his paper. The problem was not that he could not write. He had trouble crossing the midline. When I looked at the first card he glued onto the paper and followed the progression, I realized he was writing sentences in the correct word order. He was just unable to place the cards in the correct left to right direction. We began working on the midline issues. Christopher could read and write. He was just having trouble getting it on paper.
Last year Jeremy and Kenny joined my class. Like Christopher, they also have apraxia. As word began to get out that St. Rita School for the Deaf was accepting children with apraxia and having some success, other parents began to inquire about our class. Also, after teaching children with apraxia for six years, I realized that these children needed more than just sign language to succeed. They had motor and speech needs that needed to be addressed in a curriculum designed for them. The administration decided that this could best be done in a class that was just for the children with apraxia instead of combining them with the deaf students, and the Sign n’ Say class was born.
We are now working on developing relationships with members of the apraxia study groups at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital as well as other specialists in speech apraxia throughout the region. A number of speech therapists have expressed an interest in our class. Some have asked to come observe. We are happy to welcome those who are interested in what we are doing to come and visit our class.
This summer I received a surprise one morning. Hannah called me. What a thrill for me! Today, I watched the five boys in my classroom playing on the playground. Some sign more and some use their voices more but all were communicating. We are a total communication school. For a long time, people thought that St. Rita was just for deaf children. How proud I am to work for a school that was willing to think outside the box and to embrace a totally different kind of student, offering them what we’ve been giving the deaf for so long, the ability to communicate.”
