Learning American Sign Language (ASL) is easy, fun, and has multiple benefits for hearing children! Early childhood educators provide the gift of the third largest language in the U.S., ASL! Integrating ASL enhances your teaching practice and children’s language skills. This versatile teaching strategy supports whole-body learning with hearing children, English language learners, & children with exceptionalities. Not only are you supporting multilanguage education, but you are also supporting development in all other domains. Integrating ASL into your early childhood classroom is by far the best and most versatile teaching strategy, in my opinion.

Still looking for more? Here are five tips for integrating ASL into your classroom.

1. Provide visual resources – Use visual resources such as flashcards, posters, and videos to help students learn and remember signs more quickly.

2. Incorporate ASL into activities – Incorporate ASL into activities such as storytelling, nursery rhymes, and songs to make them more engaging and memorable. Producing a positive emotion with learning boosts dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the “sticky” stuff in the brain that helps the building block of memory. Therefore, enhancing the retrieval of ASL vocabulary words.

3. Encourage language development through daily routines – Daily routines are essential for children learning ASL. The positive repetition and predictable routines support attention. Therefore, it provides the brain with an opportunity to build schemas and sense psychological safety. To integrate ASL into your daily routines, identify essential daily routines and support language development by teaching those keywords to support communication.

4. Incorporate tactile & kinesthetic learning – ASL, by nature, is tactile and kinesthetic. You can incorporate ASL into your lessons by using fingerspelling, teaching key vocabulary words in ASL, and playing games, like matching signs with objects, to enhance children’s learning. Recent studies have shown that movement enhances understanding. When we get the whole body involved, children’s comprehension increases. ASL creates opportunities for children to move while engaging in the learning process.

• Download our free ASL Fingerspelling Poster

• We also have lots of FREE resources on our Toolkit site to enjoy.

5. Make it fun – Make learning ASL fun for students. Use games, puzzles, and other activities to motivate students. Remember, producing a positive emotion with learning boosts dopamine in the brain. The more “sticky” stuff, the stronger the connection is in the neural pathway. 

I look forward to seeing you in class!