Sign language a hit at Medfield Library

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By Katrina Margolis
Hometown Weekly Reporter

Charlotte Cassidy loves teaching children sign language, and so when she had the chance to share her knowledge of the language at the Medfield Public Library, she immediately acceded. On July 11, 13, 18 and 20, children ages six to ten gathered in the Children’s Room of the library to learn sign language basics.

Cassidy is a MAP teacher who learned the basics of sign language while she was working as a babysitter for a girl with Down syndrome. “In order to have the whole community, and me as a babysitter, be able to communicate with her, her family set up a class so everybody could learn the basics, and I thought it was the sweetest,” she shared. Since then, she has learned more through classes she’s taken and she loves sharing the knowledge.

Of the 10 slots open, nine were filled for each day of her course. “It went so well! They practiced at home, and they really liked the riddles we did,” Cassidy shared. Each day, Cassidy taught the kids a different set of words. The first day they did the alphabet, “so they could spell anything.” She went on, “the second day, they learned animals and they sang ‘Old McDonald,’ and then we learned numbers up to 12 and we did a clock.” She also taught them some sentence words, such as “I like” or “I see,” so that they could string together the words they had learned previously.

For the last class day, Cassidy created a spy game that incorporated everything that they had learned. “It’s so fun to teach kids sign language,” Cassidy said with a huge smile on her face. “A lot of them were saying they had people with hearing impairments in their family, so it’s really good to know.”

Part of the fun of teaching kids sign language is the creativity they use with it. “They also were saying it could be a secret code,” Cassidy said. “That’s what I did in high school, I had a friend and we would speak sign language across the classroom to each other.”