Starr Elementary School in Anderson, South Carolina is featured today on MSN.com The 1st grade class of Mrs Kayla Jordan has a student named Zoie Goolsby, who’s deaf. Kayla told the Anderson School District 3 “The first week of school, we noticed Zoie and her interpreter, Miss Moose, doing sign language for the Pledge of Allegiance. That’s something we do every morning and my students just quickly seemed interested and want to learn. I said, ‘You know what? So do I. That’s something I would like to learn too.'”
Dawne Shaw, Teacher of the Deaf at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind says “The regular classroom uses a phonics based curriculum, and that doesn’t work for her because she’s not hearing the phonics. For her, we’re using a specialized curriculum called Foundations for Literacy that’s developed for deaf children.”
So the other students said they wanted to learn sign language as well along with their teacher Mrs Jordan. So far they've learned the Pledge and are starting to learn the alphabet.
This story ties in perfectly with September being Deaf Awareness Month. Mrs Jordan says “The children love it. I feel that Zoie just sees the other children trying and learning it alongside, like me and the others, that she feels included and welcome. She’s able to communicate and now she has besties, as she calls it, like friends in the classroom and it just makes everyone feel like they’re included,”