Children at Elphinstone Primary School have been practising sign language in class and showed off their skills at a recent assembly.

P1-3 pupils took part in signing along to a song at a recent assembly in the school.

Melanie Collier is a teacher at the school and has been leading the project on teaching kids sign language.

She said: "Singing and signing became a focus in Elphinstone after the birth of my own children.

"I took them both to singing and signing and decide to bring some of my knowledge that I had learnt back to school with me after my maternity leave and have been teaching in to my different classes each year since.

"The P1/2/3s I have this year have been learning sign language since August.

"This came about as the children were interested in learning different ways in which we communicate with people and because they knew that I had some knowledge of sign language.

"We were already learning French as part of our languages curriculum but the children also wanted to add sign language to this as they thought it was an important language for everyone to learn.

"Many of the children had also watched Strictly [Come Dancing] last year and saw Rose perform and that also encouraged them to learn more about sign language.

"Since then we have been singing and signing most days, from our morning welcome song to the Alphabet Song or learning signs for things we are learning about that day.

"We have been using the British Sign Language (BSL) website and online dictionary to learn new signs to help build our knowledge of signs.

"Our recent video came about because the children wanted to learn as Scots song for Burns Day, but also wanted to sign it.

"We searched for videos of people signing this song and could not find any.

"We therefore decided to use the BSL dictionary to find to signs for the words in the song.

"The children were delighted to do this and were so proud of themselves.

"We continue each day to learn new signs and our goal is to see how many signs we can learn by the end of the school year."