href="http://kehr         iget="                         >                                             We can make a difference one child at a time                                  Keyboards for Christ Music Program     Making a difference     We support sign language. It has been said..." The Talking Hands" In our program we like to introduce children how to speak with their hearts through the hands. Just as the theme of our programs is 'on their level' we like to introduce through activity or a craft. Below is a simple example by taking craft foam and scissors, glue. Cut out the pattern of a hand and glue them together. Cut out three hearts, two small and a large one .  The letters  I and L for love, and U, bend the two fingers down in the middle and tack them with the glue to the heart that you cut out to place in the center of the hands palm. Glue the hand down to the middle of the large heart. " I Love you". Love is the key to all scripture, and the key to life. In America the Great Plains Indians developed a fairly extensive system of signing, but this was more for intertribal communication than for deaf people, and only vestiges of it remain today. However, it is interesting to note some similarities existing between Indian sign language and the present system. America owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, an energetic Congregational minister who became interested in helping his neighbor's young deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell. He traveled to Europe in 1815, when he was twenty-seven, to study methods of communicating with deaf people. While in England he met Abbe Roche Ambroise Sicard, who invited him to study at his school for deaf people in Paris. After several months Gallaudet returned to the United States with Laurent Clerc, a deaf sign language instructor from the Paris school. In 1817 Gallaudet founded the nation's first school for deaf people, in Hartford, Connecticut, and Clerc became the United States' first deaf sign language teacher. Soon schools for deaf people began to appear in several states. Among them was the New York School for the Deaf, which opened its doors in 1818. In 1820 a school was opened in Pennsylvania, and a total of twenty-two schools had been established throughout the United States by the year 1863. An important milestone in the history of education for deaf' people was the founding of Gallaudet College, in Washington, D.C. in 1864, which remains the only liberal arts college for deaf' people in the United States and the world. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet passed on his dream of a college for deaf people to his son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, who with the help of Amos Kendall made the dream a reality. Edward Miner Gallaudet became the first president of the new college. Today we are fortunate to have one of the most complete and expressive sign language systems of any country in the world. We owe much to the French sign system, from which many of our present-day signs, though modified, have been derived. To read a complete Bio of Thomas Gallaudet click here. "The Perigee Visual Dictionary of Signing" by Rod R. Butterworth and Mickey Flodin, published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 1995