Course 1 - A Play Based Learning Course - Fun and creativity shine through in this course filled with nursery rhymes, stories and other interactive fun. The intended audience is deaf children, children of deaf adults, their families and those that support them.

Course 2 - Classes for adults and older children - These friendly classes will be a great opportunity for older children, young people and adults to build your confidence with British Sign Language. These classes will encourage you communicate silently through signing and will benefit those who would prefer this more mature learning environment.

We are pleased to announce that both classes will be taught by Mags McNulty. Mags is an teacher of British Sign Language (BSL) with over 25 years experience working at present at North East Scotland College.

Mags is deaf herself and uses British Sign Language as her first language. Mags has a real talent for using varied creative ways of learning to help people learn both the vocabulary and concepts of BSL?

No prior experience with British Sign Language (BSL) is necessary for attending either class.

If you wish to register, we will ask you to share a little bit about what experience with BSL those who wish to attend may have. We'd also like to know if there are particular things you'd like to see the courses cover - whether that's particular subject areas or concepts and we'll do our best to accomodate!

We do anticipate that the people attending will vary in terms of their knowledge and experiences with. We're keen to do our best to serve and to be flexible with the course content to meet the needs of the attendees where they are at.

1. The signing that will be taught will seek to reflect British Sign Language (BSL) as it is used in the Grampian / North East Scotland / Aberdeen area.

BSL has regional variation in the signs used, just like how someone speaking English in one part of the country may sound slightly different to someone from another part of the country.

2. These courses are not connected to a formal curriculum with specific checklists of content that the courses must cover - the advantage of this is that we have greater freedom to adapt and try things to meet the needs of those attending.

Both courses will be held on the following dates:

• Saturday 25th April 2026
• Saturday 9th May 2026
• Saturday 16th May 2026
• Saturday 30th May 2026
• Saturday 6th June 2026
• Saturday 13th June 2026

Course 1 - A play based learning course - will be from 10:00am to 10:45am on each of the above dates

Course 2 - Classes for adults and older children - will be from 11:00am to 12:00noon on each of the above dates

Location: Bridge of Don Baptist Church Centre

Address: Dubford Road, Bridge of Don, Aberdeen, AB23 8GS

We ran courses there in 2025 and are pleased to return to the venue. Considerations for doing so include:

- The venue is easily accessible by bus (the 1B and 2 bus routes operated by First Bus have stops that are a few minutes walk away from the church. Both of these buses are easily caught from the centre of Aberdeen)

- The venue has good on site parking

- The lounge room we intend to hire is bright and modern with plenty of space

We will, of course, look at other venues around the area for future events.

We ran a pre-school and early years primary BSL courses in 2025. We were very pleased by the positive reception we received to those.

For 2026 we've looked to evolve our offerings:-

- The Play Based Learning Course - We found in our 2025 pre-school class - that for some children who had started school, there was still appeal and value in the play based content of those classes. With this insight - we felt it made more sense to label the course based on the nature of the content.

- The classes for older children and adults - This is our first time seeking to run a course specifically aiming to meet the needs of older children, young people and adults - we're looking forward to it!

Firstly, that's awesome! We hope the fact that you're considering signing up again means you enjoyed our first run of courses!

The courses this year are new, they are not a repeat of last year, so they should be a great way of continuing to build your knowledge and experience with BSL. As with learning any skill, learning BSL involves revisiting and reinforcing fundamentals so you may naturally find a bit of that along the way 🙂

We are offering these courses without charge.

We are pleased to have received funding support from the National Deaf Children's Society to run the Play Based Learning Course. 

The classes for adults and older children are being funded from Grampian Deaf Children's Society funds.

One of our goals as a charity is to promote the use of BSL generally as a means of promoting inclusivity for deaf children.

We are pleased therefore to use a portion of charity funds to enable this work.

If you'd like to support us financially in this mission - visit our Support Our Work page to find out how!

We've not determined maximum numbers for each course. We do have to be mindful that there is a practical limit to the number of people who can be taught at once.

We'll advise before the start of the course to confirm whether or not it is possible to accomodate your request to participate. In the event, that regretfully we need to say no this time round, we will bear that in mind for future courses.

We recognise that some people may wish to attend these courses but may have prior commitments that would prevent them from attending one or more of the sessions. We'll ask about this during registration.

If something comes up that prevents you from attending for a given week - we would appreciate if you could send us a message.

We register by family group so that if you've got a family group with several people from the family wanting to attend - you can register / sign up everyone without having to do individual forms for every family member. If it's just yourself, the same process applies 🙂

Step 1:- Register for Membership of the Grampian Deaf Children's Society - This is free, it's a chance to tell us a bit about yourself and your family, what needs you may have that it would be helpful for us to be aware of, how we can contact you etc. (we ask for this stuff once so you don't have to answer the same questions for every Grampian Deaf Children's Society event you / members of your family group attend)

Step 2:- Fill in the registration form for these courses - You'll be asked some questions about who would like to attend, what course(s) you'd like to do, what experience you have with BSL (to help us with planning) and what you'd like from the course.

Step 3:- A lovely person from the charity will be in contact to confirm places on the course and clarify anything with you

Step 4:- Get the course in your calendar and come along!

Please send us a message from the Connect with Us page or email admin@gdcs.info and let us know so we can update our plans appropriately.