AUSLAN

AUSLAN Club - Early Year Campus

We began this term in AUSLAN club by inviting some of the Prep and Grade 1 students to join us at lunch times. We helped teach them the National Anthem in AUSLAN which we perform at assembly each week.

This term we also began learning the school song ‘Dream Home’ in AUSLAN. We have been practising signing the words in the chorus and hope to be able to perform it at assembly soon.

The Year 4s have had some amazing experiences with AUSLAN this term, as Ane explains:

This year, grades 5 and 6 got the chance to take AUSLAN class. It is fun! In AUSLAN, we learn how to sign; we also learn what it is like to be a deaf person, and the struggles they go through.

This term we had an awesome incursion, it was an opera called, "The Magic Flute". In the opera, the queen of night persuades Tamino to save her daughter Pagmina who is being held captive by Sarastro, and in return, the queen will offer him Pagmina's hand in marriage. To help him on his quest the queen gives Tamino a magic flute. Off he went using the magic flute to guide him to Sarastro's temple with his newfound friend Papa Geno. When they arrived at Sarastro's temple, they soon learned that the queen of night is the real villain and the two (well prince Tamino) seek to join Sarastro's community. In the end Pagmina and prince Tamino face multiple trials and pass all of them, become a part of Sarastro's community, and foil the queen’s plan. If you are wondering what in the world this has to do with Auslan, during the whole thing it had these interpreters. Instead of adding at the side, they were part of the show! Where the characters went they went, when the characters left the stage they would leave the stage they would! Which made it so cool and appealing!

In AUSLAN, we have also been doing a few assignment, and let me tell you right now that it was not a piece of cake! We had to memorize a bunch of signs and put them into a video, and do a bunch of other stuff.

We learned about the struggles of deaf people, how they have to deal with us hearing people not understanding them, and how some people are just labelling them calling them ‘disabled’ and ‘weird’.

I personally see aspects of personal learning in AUSLAN because our awesome teacher Harry is always telling us that we should not define deaf people as different, and that we should just treat them as normal people, because that is what they are!

Recently we have been working on some posters about giving deaf people a fair go, like, teaching AUSLAN in all schools, (we are way ahead on that!) and treating them the way that the rest of us do.

We also play a range of different games in AUSLAN, such as AUSLAN whispers, where we stand in three lines. Instead of whispering a certain word or sentence, we all face in a certain direction and a word is signed and passed down the line.