Happy Hands Club Reaches Out to Students

By Kim Hall

            When five members of Celebration High School’s Happy Hands Sign Language Club walked into Jennifer Kram’s kindergarten class on Friday afternoon, the children smiled and giggled in anticipation. 

            “They kept asking, ‘Are they coming now? Are they coming now?’” Kram laughed. “They’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

            The Happy Hands Sign Language Club consists of more than 20 students from CHS that teach themselves American Sign Language and, in turn, hope to educate others about deaf culture and ASL. Friday afternoons in Kram’s class are the first step toward educating the community.

            Cheryl Cassano, assistant principal at the Celebration K-8 School, embraces the club’s efforts.

            “It’s so great for the kindergarteners because they eat up anything they learn,” Cassano said. “I tell my students that anyone can become disabled any moment. It’s important for us to be more sensitive to kids with disabilities.”

            The Happy Hands club, with the assistance of its sponsor, Katrina Logan, meets Friday mornings before school and recently started spending every other Friday after school with Kram’s class. This week, club members Corie Crawford, Meagan Eastman, Eric Mercer, Sierra Weaver and Mary Ellen DiTommaso taught the kindergarteners to sign “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

            Each club member took a small group of students and began teaching them the signs for the song while they sang. Mixing songs with ASL helps the students remember the signs more easily. Kram emphasizes the same principles when she integrates signing into her regular kindergarten curriculum, often combining signing and pronunciation into the same lesson.

            “My kids know all their letters now,” Kram said proudly.

            As the kindergartners sing, they are particularly attentive to the club members’ signing and mimic their motions. After a few verses, most of the kindergartners are able to do much of the signing without the visual guidance of the student teachers.

            Crawford, a sophomore and the president and founding member of Happy Hands, has been learning ASL since the second grade. She actually teaches the Happy Hands members ASL, sometimes with the assistance of the club’s vice president, Eastman. She said she got the ideas for what to teach by outlining and following the order of what she learned when she first started.

            “I had a teacher named Miss Rose, who was fluent in ASL,” Crawford said. “In our spare time after classes, she would teach us random signs, such as colors and animals.”

            Crawford credits the idea for starting Happy Hands to Ed Kuzma, one of her past teachers and a friend of her family.

            “He knew all about my interest in sign language and thought it would be wonderful to spread the culture around to my own peers at school,” she said. “My entire family thought it was a great idea, and it was really a team effort to get it off the ground into becoming a reality.”

            Their sponsor, Logan, also supported the club members when they suggested making signing a second language class at CHS. Principal Dan White wholeheartedly agreed and, with the continued support of the faculty and staff, CHS plans to officially offer ASL as a language option in the fall of 2007.

            “American Sign Language should most definitely be offered as a foreign language in schools,” Crawford said. “People who would argue that … they would never use it … are those people who don’t know that ASL is the fourth most common language spoken in the United States.”

            Sierra Weaver, another student member of Happy Hands, said her favorite part of being a member is getting to share what she has learned with others, like Kram’s kindergarten class.

            “Not only does the club teach us the language so that we can communicate with the deaf, but we learn about the deaf culture,” Weaver said. “I now understand more about what life is like for those who are deaf.”

            The Happy Hands club hopes that the Celebration community will take advantage of the members by using them at town events.

            “Anytime a pledge of allegiance needs to be said or a song needs to be sung in a show, we’d love to get a call and be able to help them out,” Crawford said. “We are always looking for opportunities to sign.”