It’s that time of year, where, no matter your persuasion – it seems like a jolly good idea to get together and eat a lot. Yes folks, it was time for the SH! BSL End of Year/Xmas party!
I hadn’t really given it much thought if I am honest – I’ve been busy forward planning and setting up new courses for next year, but one by one students kept asking the question. What are we doing and where?!
The date was set and our venue pre booked as we were there anyway, Tuesday 17th December at the Deaf Centre in Norwich. My dilemma was how to ensure everyone had a good time and felt included, no matter their skill.
I teach from Deaf Awareness & Introduction to BSL through to Level 3 and also intended on including some of my Deaf friends and supporters who assist me in teaching. So in this party I would have some fluent signers and some still in their baby steps stage. What to do?
We firstly agreed on the most important aspect – the food! Everyone was going to bring a plate to share and we were to enjoy what resulted in a delicious spread of buffet foods.
When people first arrived the food was the main pull, isn’t that normally the case? So, all my students were happily tucking in and chatting to each other verbally as they piled their plates and exchanged stories. To be honest, it was a treat to see – I don’t normally encourage chatting as we are there to learn but to see the joy on their faces and for some a reunion or surprise meeting, it really was sweet. Obviously, there was the obvious banter about Xmas jumpers and fancy outfits and the party was in full swing.
I have to say a huge thank you at this point to my Deaf volunteers who kindly set up the room for us all to sit in a group, ready to play some games. The whole thing worked like clockwork and I feel so grateful to everyone who made it such a huge success and – well, FUN!
Our first game was this – imagine three walls (well, we didn’t have to, we were sitting there!). One wall is designated YELLOW with a post it note – no expense spared with us, eh? Then one is GREEN and the other is RED. With me so far? We then had a multi choice question based on Deaf culture and history. There would be 3 possible answers and each one related to a colour. So if the question was, say: What is the name of a famous Deaf comedian who used to teach aerobics? YELLOW – John Smith GREEN – Terry Edwards RED – Gavin Lilley. As soon as I asked the question and showed the possible answers, people had to sprint to the right colour ‘wall’ and touch the colour, a bit like the game Twister.
The trouble was, some people were seated nearer the correct coloured wall and had an advantage. The first person to get to touch the correct colour won 5 points and 2nd was only 1 point. So there was a lot of comedic outrage regarding this and we had to make it geographically fairer. We moved the post it notes to the middle of the room on a table, so no one could complain. It goes without saying, that there was much hilarity and mirth as people chopped and changed as they debated the answers.
You can probably imagine that there was a fair amount of elbows and shoves involved too and I did have to give some participants a warning for misbehaviour, although as you can imagine you couldn’t take it seriously … Big thank you to David Salmon who managed to keep track of the scores despite the chaos.
There were four teams competing – The Signing Santas; The Elves; The Golden Stars and The Reindeers. I made sure that the teams consisted of a fair number of learners from different levels of BSL by giving each class a number e.g 1, 2 or 3 and then asking one from each to join the team. That way we didn’t have fluent signers winning every round over the ones who are still picking up the skills.
For our next game we did a ‘Guess Who’. A team member from each team would be given the picture of someone famous and their team had to guess who it was from the description and stand up and finger spell their name. I was the referee and to be quite honest, they kept me on my toes, I was sweating by the end of it, keeping tabs on guesses and winners. It was great! It was so funny to see the competitiveness and some of the descriptions too. We got through 8 famous people per team and it was really fast paced and kept everyone on their toes. 10 points to the first one and the 2nd place only get 5 points.
Another game we played was ‘Chinese Whispers’ in BSL. To keep it fair we did it in different skill levels so that no one felt overwhelmed. We BSL signs the Xmas related stories for each Levels. The last one with everyone involved, I signed a Deaf Xmas story about Father Christmas leaving the gifts under the tree and so on… The next person along had to turn and sign what they saw to describe the story and honestly, there were tears of laughter at some of the twists in the tales. By the end of it it was about a cow.
At the end of the night everyone mucked in to help tidy up – the food that was brought in was out of this world, some of the most delicious homemade sausage rolls (a personal favourite!) and plenty of variety too. Really grateful to everyone who contributed and made it such a special evening. We all helped to leave the Deaf Centre spotless by cleaning up and hoovering and it was a wrap. A real Christmas ‘cracker’ of an evening.
