Resources for teaching (hearing) children sign language

[kalanamak]

Most specifically, I'm interested in exact signed English or cued English.

 

Papa is HOH from noise exposure, and it is getting worse and worse. He hates hearing aids, but is catching onto the signs I do use, e.g. "where?" "when" "who" "help" "I understand". I would love a DVD program for kiddo, who is 8 and spends all day having to shout to Papa. Since Papa already knows English, and will speak to us, the less he has to learn the better, hence my interest in exact signed English rather than ASL, which, AFAIR, has its own grammar. Grammar and language is not Papa's strong point.

 

Thanks

[Dmmetler]

Garlic Press has a curriculum called "The Word in the Hand" designed to teach SE to hearing students as a second language. It's on about a 3rd grade level, maybe, but could be adapted. You can see videos for most of the signs if you go on ASL Pro or Lifeprint, since most of the base signs are the same.

[~Jo]

Well my dd's have one of the best teachers for SL...a older "sibling"* who is is studying to be an interpreter for the deaf. She is now in her third year of college study.

 

The reason I mention this is that if you have a college close by that has this type of program the students may be looking for students to teach. They did this last year for our home school group and it was free of charge for the home school students. They may offer something similar where you live? The college students needed this exposure and it gave them "hours" towards their classes. Here they need a certain amount per semester working with deaf and hearing. You may be able to customize a program for your family.

 

*she is not exactly a sibling but she spends so much time in our home (lives here on the weekends especially) that she refers to us as her weekend family. :D

[Rosie_0801]

It sounds to me as though you need neither cued English nor SEE.

 

He speaks English, so keyword signing using ASL should be just fine, less effort, and more natural. He'll naturally use them in English word order and as his interest increases, there'll be fewer gaps between the keywords. If you teach him SEE or something like that, he'll probably just get lazy and start dropping those little words English has and signed languages don't anyway because most of them get annoying.

 

Just borrow anything you can find from the library, and online. Do put some effort into classifiers at some stage. They can be a bit of a pain to learn, but once you are ok at them, you see how much less effort they are than learning the SEE equivalents.

 

 

Rosie

[JRmommy]

"Signing Time" DVDs are great for kids! They are rather expensive, but our library had them. Also, you can find great deals on eBay.

 

An online resource is www.aslpro.com. There is a video for each word.

 

Hope that helps!

[Susan in KY]

"Signing Time" DVDs are great for kids! They are rather expensive, but our library had them. Also, you can find great deals on eBay.

 

An online resource is www.aslpro.com. There is a video for each word.

 

Hope that helps!

:iagree: We used these, too.

[kalanamak]

It sounds to me as though you need neither cued English nor SEE.

 

He speaks English, so keyword signing using ASL should be just fine, less effort, and more natural. He'll naturally use them in English word order and as his interest increases, there'll be fewer gaps between the keywords. If you teach him SEE or something like that, he'll probably just get lazy and start dropping those little words English has and signed languages don't anyway because most of them get annoying.

 

Just borrow anything you can find from the library, and online. Do put some effort into classifiers at some stage. They can be a bit of a pain to learn, but once you are ok at them, you see how much less effort they are than learning the SEE equivalents.

 

 

Rosie

 

I may have fallen afoul of people who have turned signing and deafness into "an issue", but have been loudly told ASL is its own language with a grammar and syntax of its own. Hubby has enough trouble with language without introducing a different word order.

 

In the question "Where are my keys" I'm not sure if "where? my keys" or "[some sort of attention getting sign....given hubby, a pinch is often needed] keys [pause while this sinks in] my keys [pause] WHERE?" would work best.

 

When my dad got very, very old and deaf, we used this technique and it worked very well, but he not only had a very fast brain, he and us had decades of communicating with each other, whereas hubby and I come from very different backgrounds and he does not have the associations I have in my, more standard, educated speech. If you got my Dad on a topic, often by hand spelling, he could then limit the vocabulary he was trying to lip read, and run likelihoods in decreasing likelihoodness, and often on the first or second try get right what we were getting at. (E.g. spell C-A-K-E, and he'd say "do I want a peice?" and if I shook my head, he'd say "are you making one? [i nod] I'd like chocolate. [and I give a thumbs up]". This would NEVER happen with hubby.)

 

Regardless, I think kiddo and I will end up shouting and giving up less if we could get at least the topic at hand in Papa's head.

 

Ideally, I'd like a Minimus-like sign language DVD. Isn't the imagination a wonderful thing??

[kalanamak]

"Signing Time" DVDs are great for kids! They are rather expensive, but our library had them. Also, you can find great deals on eBay.

 

An online resource is www.aslpro.com. There is a video for each word.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Thanks. Kiddo finds it very appealing, and he is off busily compiling a list of "must haves" and "would be fun to knows".

[Rosie_0801]

I may have fallen afoul of people who have turned signing and deafness into "an issue", but have been loudly told ASL is its own language with a grammar and syntax of its own.

 

Yeah, well. These things are "an issue" as you say. Make a mental note not to discuss it with people who need to make it an issue at EVERY opportunity.

 

Hubby has enough trouble with language without introducing a different word order.

 

It's not that big a deal, really. The grammatical rules of signed languages are quite real, but they are more flexible than in a spoken language. If you have a short sentence like "where are my keys" which is only two signs, it really doesn't matter which way around you put the word. Using topic markers, which is what you are talking about, becomes more important in longer conversations. Teaching that grammatical idea only speeds up something that will come naturally if you wait long enough. Heck, I use them in English for hubby's benefit at times!

 

The reason you don't really want to use SEE in this instance is it more effort. I wish I could remember this well enough to look it up and provide you with proper, rather than half remembered, info. Basically, though, signed languages and spoken languages are received with the same sort of speed and effort over all. (Yeah, some things require a full sentence in one language that only requires one word in the other, but overall.) SEE is slower, bulkier, more effort (and far more boring) than both. It loses the infections of English without replacing them with the inflections of a signed language. A lot of the nuanced grammatical features of a signed language are markings of good storytellers. You don't have to be a great storyteller to speak English. You can have a perfectly sensible conversation, relating a story, to anyone, without using those skills. They just make it "prettier." In the same way, you can never bother with certain (not all!) grammatical elements of a signed language and still have perfectly sensible, every day, conversations. You guys would certainly benefit from learning classifiers, even if they take practice as they do for those of us who aren't particularly visual-spacial. Don't worry about the rest. You are not trying to become ASL interpreters.

 

Regardless, I think kiddo and I will end up shouting and giving up less if we could get at least the topic at hand in Papa's head.

 

Perhaps expand on this bit for me? What's so hard about getting a topic into Papa's head? Why won't speak-signing work?

 

Ideally, I'd like a Minimus-like sign language DVD. Isn't the imagination a wonderful thing??

 

Sure! (What does a Minimus-like sign language dvd even mean?:lol:)

 

Rosie

[Doodle]

He speaks English, so keyword signing using ASL should be just fine, less effort, and more natural. He'll naturally use them in English word order and as his interest increases, there'll be fewer gaps between the keywords.

 

 

This is how I use ASL signs. While I have taken ASL 1-4, no one I know signs. ASL signs are a tool I use along with hearing aids to help me navigate through the speaking world I live in.

[kalanamak]

 

 

 

Perhaps expand on this bit for me? What's so hard about getting a topic into Papa's head? Why won't speak-signing work?

 

 

 

Sure! (What does a Minimus-like sign language dvd even mean?:lol:)

 

Rosie

 

The Latin book Minimus...I like that gentle, story-filled intro to Latin for children this young. If we had that like of curriculum, on a DVD, for signing....that would be my dream. Maybe you could do it......

 

What is hard about getting a topic in Papa's head is that we are just starting this, he tends to live in a world of his own, and he has, IMO, idiosyncratic associations....he is much more of a magical thinker than either me or our son (e.g. If I asked him where are the keys, his reply would be "I need to go to the video store".....the relationship being the "key" brought up the idea of the car, and in the car is the overdue vid, etc. etc. In my memory he has NEVER, EVER answered a direct question directly. I was brought up in a large family of older sibs, sitting at hour plus dinners where we behaved like ladies and gentlemen and "discussed things". Linen tablecloths, lumpless gravy, and Logic were king. He grew up in poverty, grubbiness, and the unlike-my-childhood-as-possibe trio of Bible, Beatings, and Incest. Evasiveness and "playing dumb" are his default mode. As you can imagine, his failing hearing is putting a ball and chain on the already halt.)

[HomefrontSix]

We've used Signing Time in the past and both of my children enjoy it (neither are D/HH). I use aslpro.com and HandSpeak as resources when teaching sign (I have studied sign since I was a child but I am not D/HH) at church.

 

The last true curriculum that I used when actually taking classes was Signing Naturally which you can find HERE.

 

 

Hope that helps!

[Rosie_0801]

The Latin book Minimus...I like that gentle, story-filled intro to Latin for children this young. If we had that like of curriculum, on a DVD, for signing....that would be my dream.

 

Not surprisingly, I don't know if there is any such thing. Others might. Have you tried youtube?

 

Maybe you could do it......

I could, but it wouldn't be any use to you! :lol:

 

What is hard about getting a topic in Papa's head is that we are just starting this, he tends to live in a world of his own, and he has, IMO, idiosyncratic associations....he is much more of a magical thinker than either me or our son (e.g. If I asked him where are the keys, his reply would be "I need to go to the video store".....the relationship being the "key" brought up the idea of the car, and in the car is the overdue vid, etc. etc. In my memory he has NEVER, EVER answered a direct question directly.

Oh man. One of those types who thinks most of a paragraph and only verbalises the last sentence.

 

As you can imagine, his failing hearing is putting a ball and chain on the already halt.)

I can't even imagine how to help. If he can't/doesn't want to communicate in the standard manner, it won't matter what language is employed. What does he want communicated to him?

 

:grouphug:

Rosie

[kalanamak]

 

I can't even imagine how to help. If he can't/doesn't want to communicate in the standard manner, it won't matter what language is employed. What does he want communicated to him?

 

:grouphug:

Rosie

 

Well, get him on something he can do, with a vision of it, and he can do amazing work, like remodeling and fixing things. He is amazing with his hands. However, it is frustrating for all if he jumps to the conclusion he is to get/do X and finds out it was Y. Misunderstandings actually waste a lot of his time, and since he is very dyslexic, verbal is about all that can happen. So. Today we taught him "who?" and "happy", and told my son to try to remember to use it *every* time we say those words.

[Rosie_0801]

So would you say he's the visual spacial type then?

 

Rosie

 

P.S This looks useful for vocab