Our BSL school curriculum is led by a qualified school teacher with over 10 years experience within both primary & secondary schools.
Intent
British Sign Language (BSL) is the legally recognised language for the deaf and hearing-impaired community in Britain. At Deaf Can! we understand that the early acquisition of an additional language enhances and reinforces the learning and development in all other areas of the curriculum.
Our rich, comprehensive and unique curriculum is suitable for children from Early Years to Key Stage 4. Our program is structured and scaffolded to ensure progression with the expectation that most children that will take exams to gain nationally recognised certification from Signature.
Implementation
The curriculum will be delivered in person by a qualified school teacher who will use a variety of collaborative activities and different teaching methods.
For Early Years, Key Stage 1 & 2 children, the curriculum will be delivered in a relaxed, fun and engaging way incorporating visual, audio and kinaesthetic approaches. The children will be taught through age-appropriate stories, songs and dances.
In line with active learning methodologies, class activities will include: pair work, group-work (dialogue practice, information gap exercises, discussion), individual tasks, discovery and formulation of grammatical rules. The purpose of these activities will be to revise and consolidate the children's knowledge while developing their awareness of how to use language learning tools independently.
Our approach in our curriculum not only ensures that all children engage in a wide range of tasks and activities, but also seeks to support different learning styles.
Every session will have mixture of signing practice and verbal communication.
The curriculum is taught in a spiral curriculum and include the following topics:
- Introducing yourself & polite conversation
- Alphabet & Fingerspelling
- Numbers
- Hobbies & Interests
- Family & Home
- Time & Days of the Week
- Weather
- Work
- Daily Routine
Continuous formative & summative assessment will be undertaken by the tutor during all class activities and home learning tasks.
Impact
The impact of our curriculum is that the majority of children will be able to:
- Engage in everyday communicative situations e.g. greetings, telling the time and date, counting and fingerspelling, describing the weather, people and activities;
- Construct and follow short narratives in BSL about generic topics e.g. the home, the family, and leisure activities;
- Recognise and apply the basic linguistic features of BSL and the implications of being Deaf in a hearing world;
- To become global citizens who understand their wider world and their place in it;
- Reflect meaningfully on their progress and pursue further study.
All of our teaching staff have a current and clean DBS, which is available on the update service.
