Silent sprint

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers

Setting up this activity

• Make sure you have some printed copies of the BSL sheets for both right-handed and left-handed finger spelling.

Learn the letters 

1. Gather everyone in a circle.
2. Ask if anyone knows what finger spelling is or has done it before.
3. Explain that finger spelling is a method of spelling words using hand movements. The fingerspelling alphabet is used in sign language to spell out names of people and places for which there's not a sign for. Fingerspelling can also be used to spell words for signs that the signer doesn't know the sign for, or to clarify a sign that's not known by the person reading the signer.
4. Tell everyone it's used in British Sign Language (BSL), which is what you'll be using. BSL uses a two-handed alphabet however some other sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), use a one-handed alphabet.
5. Everyone should get into small teams, with each team needing a finger spelling chart for right-handed and/or left-handed people.
6. Each team should practice some different letters. They could start by learning the vowels (A, E, I, O, U).
7. Now, everyone should try and put some of the letters together to make short words. They should start with simple words, such as ‘cat’ or ‘home’, or maybe their name.

Play silent sprint

1. When everyone's had time to learn the letters, explain that you're going to play a game called ‘Silent Sprint.’
2. Each team should get into lines, with everyone facing the same direction.
   
3. A player who’s confident with understanding finger spelling should be the team captain.
4. The team captain should stand behind the group. They'll be given a word to spell by the person running the activity.
   
5. The team captains should go and find out the chosen word from the person leading the activity, then return to the back of the group.
6. The player at the back of the line (the one who's in front of the team captain) should turn around and face the team captain.
7. The team captain should fingerspell their word. The player at the back of the line should fingerspell it back, to check they’ve understood.
   
8. Once the player at the back of the line is confident, they should turn around. They should get the attention of the person in front of them by gently tapping their shoulder. They should repeat steps six and seven, with the person at the back of the line spelling the word to the person in front of them.
   
9. The team should keep repeating steps six to eight to pass the word all the way to the front of the line.
   
10. As the fingerspelling moves up the line, the team captain should move to stand at the front. The last player to have a turn should spell the word to the team captain.
11. After the final person has signed the word, the team captain should tell everyone if they've managed to pass the correct word all the way up the line.
    
12. The winning team's the first to get the right word all the way to the front of the line.
13. Tell everyone that although the goal's to get your message down the line as quickly as possible, it's more important to be understood.
14. You should try a practice run before your race to make sure that everyone in the group is comfortable and understands how to play.
15. Once you've raced once, you could change the team captain, use longer words or have people further spread out to make it harder.