GLASGOW – Logan Brooks doesn’t need to open her mouth to say a lot.

Monday, Brooks’ hands, arms and facial expressions had just as much to communicate as any speaker.

Between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m., Brooks taught the final lesson in a six-session course on the basics of American Sign Language at the Mary Wood Weldon Memorial Library in Glasgow.

Monday was a day dedicated to mostly reviewing material Brooks taught in earlier classes.

Throughout the hour-long session, Brooks guided the class through a range of signs for emotions, relatives, colors and animals.

While working through the emotions, Brooks noted the importance of combining hand gestures with (frequently exaggerated) facial expressions to get the point across.

The sign for “happy,” for instance, involves smiling while tracing bubbles floating up from the chest.

“You’ve got to show how you really feel so you’ve got to make a silly face,” she said.

Animals, meanwhile, involve visually replicating some aspect of the species in question, whether that’s mimicking a donkey’s long ears by placing one hand, fingers stretched out but kept together, above the head or imitating the hunched bouncing of a kangaroo.

“You really have to act these things out. It’s kind of silly but that’s just what you do,” Brooks said.

After the session, Brooks said she remembered learning bits of ASL as a part of various activities as a kid but decided to explore the language more seriously while studying at Eastern Kentucky University.

“I learned sign language when I was a kid for songs and just a few little things and for my foreign language in college, it was just really easy for me to pick it up,” she said.

Brooks said she ultimately found that combining her passion for teaching and knowledge of ASL seemed right, ultimately becoming a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing.

“I knew I wanted to be a teacher but I didn’t know what kind, so whenever sign language became so easy for me, I just went for it. It … became a passion,” she said.

After the lesson, Cheryl Slinker said she was taking the class for a second time.

Much of the class’ curriculum was a review for her, though in the time since she first took the class, Slinker has made good use of what she’s learned.

“I have run into deaf people and been able to communicate with them on a basic level,” she said.

Slinker said ASL is intuitive because the way it visually represents concepts makes sense, noting in particular that the signs for several animals involve miming well-known animal characteristics.

“When she was doing the animals, you’re signing stuff that makes sense,” she said.

Slinker has been able to retain much of what she’s learned by meeting with a deaf child at the school Brooks teaches at once a week to work on craft projects with her and help her with homework on a volunteer basis.

Slinker described herself as a “lifelong learner” and said she originally took the class because she was interested in sign language and the communication issues deaf people often face.

“People in the deaf community, they’re so secluded,” she said.

With the exception of last year, Brooks has been teaching the basics of ASL every summer at the library for roughly a decade.

She said the class started as a program specifically for teachers to help them communicate with deaf and hard of hearing students.

“That’s how we started it. We had it for (educators) because there was a lot of need for it,” she said, adding that there aren’t enough teachers who can use ASL for every school district in the state to have one.

Soon, though, she learned there was demand from the community at large for ASL classes that were open to the community at large.

“They were wanting me to do two sessions and I just couldn’t do that so we just opened it to everybody at that point,” she said.

“It was just an opportunity to be able to reach the community and they reached out to me and I enjoy it.”