One Head Start turns to sign language for whole classes

Mar. 10—CAMBRIDGE — Last fall, the preschoolers’ Head Start classroom in this village featured a lot of screaming arguments.

While each fight was rooted in typical preschooler problems — sharing, taking turns — the staff said it was much harder to resolve than in pre-COVID-19 times. The issue: The children could not understand each other. Head Start officials blamed masks, which reduced the children’s chance of getting COVID but hurt their language development, they said.

“Articulation is the biggest thing. They can’t form the word exactly right, because they haven’t seen it,” said L.E.A.P. Head Start Cambridge Valley Center lead teacher Aleisha LeClair.

The children spent their toddlerhood at Head Start with masks on, and they are now noticeably behind their pre-COVID peers in language development. At first, even LeClair struggled to understand the children.

“Think about ‘th,’” she said. “If you don’t show them how to make that, they can’t make that sound. You can’t just tell them. It’s not something they’re able to visualize.”

The children also couldn’t easily hear each other through their masks. That discouraged casual conversation.

And the children were often not taken to the many places that families went pre-COVID, losing out on the vocabulary they would have picked up on those trips.

“A lot of these children were very isolated — they didn’t go to stores, they didn’t go to (indoor) playgrounds, so they didn’t pick up on a lot of that incidental language development,” said American Sign Language teacher Amy Smith.

Now, at ages 3 to 5, LeClair’s students aren’t using full sentences. They’ll say one word instead.

Many Head Start schools (early childhood education for economically disadvantaged families) and other preschools have called in speech therapists, including for LeClair’s class. But in the meantime, LeClair had frustrated children who could not communicate with each other.

So she turned to sign language.

She asked the Capital Region Language Center to teach American Sign Language to the teachers at Head Start. Then they taught the students.

It’s led to a jump in vocabulary.

“They start with the sign and then they’re saying the word,” she said. “They’ve come from guessing what their friend is saying to having conversations now.”

The most popular sign: toilet, which the justtrained students needed to ask for a lot.

It’s helping them learn their letters, too. One boy couldn’t remember the first letter of his name, but he could remember the sign. That’s a good first step, she said.

“They’re attaching what they’re doing to the word,” she said. “They’re very hands-on at this age.”

It was an obvious solution to LeClair because she previously taught in a classroom that routinely used signs because all of the students were nonverbal. But other teachers have been inspired by the change in her classroom.

“It was really an incredible idea,” said Kim Andersen, founder and director of Capital Region Language Center, who is hoping more preschools try it.

The center created a list of “prime” communication needs: feelings, needs (hungry, thirsty, toilet) and activities to request. Smith then taught those to the Head Start teachers, including the aide in LeClair’s classroom.

LeClair also taught the children the signs for colors and the alphabet, and now they’re learning to sign their morning circle songs, including the everpopular Days of the Week song.

It worked exactly as expected — the children did not become fluent in sign language, but began to communicate more and argue less.

“It helped lower their frustrations, gave them a means to communicate,” Smith said. “There’s lots of research that shows learning ASL does help with the spoken language acquisition.”