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Sign Language

Signing Is Easy

Signing is easy.  While still in the womb your baby begins to move hands and wiggle fingers.  While lying in a crib your baby begins to observe motion and movements.  The hand and finger movement combined with the observation of motion are the building blocks of sign language.  These building blocks allow your baby to learn and communicate visually at a young age.  For parents: Simply learn a few words at a time starting with selected words from our Everyday Signs list.


Sign Language History

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, an energetic Congregational minister became interested in helping his neighbor's young deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell.  He traveled to Europe in 1815, when he was twenty-seven, to study methods of communicating with the deaf.  While in England he met Abbe Roche Ambroise Sicard, who invited him to study at his school for  the deaf in Paris.  After several months Gallaudet returned to the United States with Laurent Clerc, a deaf sign language instructor from the Paris school.  In 1817 Gallaudet founded the nation's first school for the deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut, and Clerc became the United States' first deaf sign language teacher.  Soon schools for deaf people began to appear in several states.  Among them was the New York School for the Deaf, which opened its doors in 1818.  In 1820 a school was opened in Pennsylvania, and a total of twenty-two schools had been established throughout the United States by the year 1863.  An important milestone in the history of education for deaf' people was the founding of Gallaudet College, in Washington, D.C. in 1864, which remains the only liberal arts college for the deaf in the United States and the world.  Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet passed on his dream of a college for the deaf to his son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, who with the help of Amos Kendall made the dream a reality.  Edward Miner Gallaudet became the first president of the new college.  Today we are fortunate to have one of the most complete and expressive sign languages of any country in the world.
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