It's showtime! Deaf drama at Gospel Primary School for the Deaf

And my last task for today involved putting on a semi-polished 'Deaf Awareness' performance for all the deaf children at Gospel Primary School for the Deaf. Including the deaf performers, there are about 55x deaf children at this school.

The children performing were so excited & nervous - including the deaf & hearing teachers who are performing in this show also! All have never done this before! In fact, they have never done drama before!

They loved it, were such great performers & signed beautifully. The audience had a really great time too!

We also invited the school principal from Gospel High to come & watch the show. She was impressed & said they are so good at it! Oh I do hope they will do more drama at the school now because it is a wonderful way for the deaf students to express themselves! I am glad I found the time to put this show together with the students - within 1-week (approx. 2.5hrs per group)! Now the students have a good excuse to do more drama between now & October. They will need to rehearse this show up until October - to give their final & best performance at the school's 10-year anniversary event - which will be held on 'World Teacher's Day'.

Something interesting for you to know. One boy is 20y.o in this school. This boy only started primary school when he was 17y.o - just 3-yrs ago! Up until he was 17y.o he might have been isolated in a Fijian village somewhere. But it is better late to start school than never! So this is why some of the deaf students at the primary school look so big! There really is a need to get more deaf awareness out in the villages so we may get deaf children into school earlier & so they may learn language asap - as like hearing children do. If deaf children are left in the villages, many will not develop language skills. So this has been one of my challenges when working with deaf primary school children - communicating clearly because some have only just been introduced to language & are only just learning to sign. But having worked with the children a bit now I can see they do pick up the sign language very quickly, go on to be smart & very keen learners! This is clearly evident amongst deaf students who have been at school for at least a couple of years.

Tomorrow, the deaf children are thrilled to know that I will finally be joining them at the olympic swimming pool in town. They are so excited & have been asking me to join them for awhile now - as part of their regular Friday sporting activity. I have not been able to attend before because up until now I have been teaching at the highschool on Fridays. The children were keen to know what I will wear. I told them I only have bikinis but will cover up! They giggled & laughed. So the trip to the pool will be a nice way to finish my last day in school & my last day of university! Yay!