We Hunger Youse A Happy Christmas

     With only seven more days of school to go and culminating projects in full swing, the ASL Club had its most fun meeting yet.

    Two weeks before, I had compiled a Holiday-themed vocabulary lesson, and scavenged the internet for the signs required to sign the first few verses of, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and, "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas". A member had asked if we could sign a Christmas song before the break, so I decided to give them the option to choose from a list of at least two songs. In the end, I probably spent about four hours prepping for this meeting...but who's counting?

    So when I handed out the Human Bingo sheets at the beginning of the meeting today, I was feeling conservatively optimistic that this was going to go pretty well. I had learned from the previous few weeks to not be overly hopeful or cynical about meetings, and I think I've found a nice happy medium. 

    After that, we did a quick reflection activity so I could see how everyone was feeling about the club and maybe get some tips on how to improve in the New Year. On a sticky note, everyone wrote what they loved about the club and the results melted my heart.

    Not only did people enjoy learning ASL, but they also loved the community we had made and meeting new people! I couldn't have hoped for a better response.

    There is this one kid who asks every week for a Kahoot! and, after two consecutive weeks of ignoring him in favour of the time I save from not making them, I decided to make one for review. And guess what? This was the first meeting so far that he had to skip. I could just see God laughing at me and my "fool-proof" plans. Nonetheless, everyone had a lot of fun with the friendly competition.

    From there, we learned some Christmas signs and the signs for some other holidays, including Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Years'. 

    Lastly, we decided to learn the first two verses of, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". A lot of the words in the song don't exist in ASL and vice versa (or more accurately, some English words have multiple ASL meanings and some ASL words have multiple English meanings. This is called polysemy). For example, the sign for HUNGER/HUNGRY is used for the word, "wish" and HAPPY is used for "merry". There is also an ASL plural form for "you", called YOUSE. As you can imagine, that got pretty confusing (especially when singing along with what we were singing) but everyone had a lot of fun trying and laughing together. 

    After that (and a little prompting from my best friend (okay, the whole thing was her idea but...)), I asked everyone if they would like to learn a whole song in ASL for the last two meetings before the end of the semester.

    We decided that we would gather suggestions and create a poll on the club's Google Classroom for people to vote on what song we will learn in the New Year. 

    I would absolutely love to take credit for this week's successful meeting, but if it weren't for the suggestion of learning a Christmas song, that kid's love of Kahoots, my friend's prompting, the enthusiasm of all the club's members, and the ongoing support of my family and teachers, I'm pretty sure this club wouldn't even exist! So I'm going to continue asking for constant suggestions, feedback, and input and I'm going to keep on being open to new ideas.