ASL--Life print--I have questions

[Garga]

I found thread after thread saying that LifePrint (ASL University) is an excellent resource for learning ASL.  This is great news, because it's free.  It's like a unicorn--excellent resource AND free?!  Sign me up!

But I have some questions:

1.   Per this link http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lessons.htm, lessons 1-15 are for college level ASL 1 and lessons 16-30 are for college level ASL 2.

That sounds like two full years of ASL for the foreign language credit in high school.  But on the threads I found about LifePrint, it seemed that people would have their kids do ASL 1 and ASL 2 *in the same year*.  Why both in one year?  Did you do both in one year because the lessons were so short that you needed to do all 30 lessons to meet the basic 120-150 hours per credit guideline for high school credit (4-5 hours of study a week).?  Or did you do a total of 240 hours over the course of the school year, so you really did take two years of language in one school year?  

My high schooler works at a slow and steady pace.  I don't want to try to squeeze 2 years of instruction into 1 year.  I want him to do 120-150 hours of ASL between August and May (4-5 hours of work a week).  No more than that.  Should we do lessons 1-15 to meet that goal, or lessons 1-30?

2.  On the transcript, if you completed lessons 1-30, did you assign 2 high school credits or just 1 for both?  From other threads, it seems that ASL 1 is one semester at the college level, and ASL 2 is a second semester at the college level, so it sounds like it should be 2 high school credits.  Or do you assign credit based on the hours it took to learn the lessons. If it took only 4-5 hours a week for lessons 1-30, then it's only one high school credit...right?

3.  Any tips for how you do the lessons?  I have clicked on a few of the lessons.  I see that there's a video and links to videos of short phrases. Did you spread each lesson out over a week and memorize the phrases and then check that you were doing it right by clicking on the links to the phrases? What was a good way to break up all those links in the lessons: look at them all on Monday and then practice them for the rest of the week until you had them memorized?  Did you go back to earlier lessons from time to time to review?  

I randomly clicked on lesson 6.  There is a video, there are the links to phrases. But then there's a part that reads "Story 6" with descriptions of how to describe your room.  What do we do with that?  Read over it and then practice describing our own room?  What's the point of the stories: to write our own?

I'll be my 8th grader, 11th grader, and me learning ASL from this site, and I need to figure out a way to plan our weeks so that we're all on the same page, so any tips on how you spread out the work would be great. 

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I saw these WTMers respond to previous threads saying they'd used LifePrint, so maybe you guys have some answers?  ?  

@bugfree @Renai @AMJ @Junie @travelgirlut @2Peanuts @Kendall @Tess in the Burbs

[HomeAgain]

I can't answer all your questions. We use Lifeprint, but differently.

Each lesson has a list of objectives to meet.  I print these out as my guide for the week.  DS and I watch the lesson together, then practice the next couple of days using the objectives as a guide.  We put together a study group that meets and covers the same lesson to do the conversation practice.  We take up to 2 weeks, depending on how much information there is to learn.  The practice quiz is given as many times as needed, then the quiz. The individual lesson parts and stories below are additional segmented aids to the lesson, so you don't have to watch the same video over and over.  I find the stories helpful to have practice observing the signs in context better.  Once you watch the story, read it to see how well you comprehended what you watched.  There are often notes below that answer questions about the grammar or name signs used in the video.

[Junie]

Last year I did ASL 1 and 2 (in one year) with ds17, dd15, and dd13.

The primary reason we did it in one year was because ds17 needed two years of a foreign language for graduation.  He had taken Spanish 1 previously but did not enjoy it.  I gave him the choice of doing Spanish 2 or of doing ASL 1 and 2.  He chose ASL.

 

We did not use the full website.  We watched the videos on youtube and then did the multiple choice quizzes for each lesson.

I gave a couple of outside assignments -- a biography report (in English) about a deaf person and a group project of telling a children's Bible story in ASL.

We also discussed a few items regarding deaf culture.

 

I did give 2 credits (as explained above -- ds17 needed them).  Somewhere on the lifeprint website he indicates that the classes should be put on a high school transcript according to their class titles: ASL 1, ASL 2.  I decided that if he felt the class was worth that much credit, than I could safely put in on the transcript as such.  (Truthfully it seemed a little on the light side for me.)

How we watched the lessons (two each week):

Monday -- parts A and B

Tuesday -- parts C and D followed by the quiz

Wednesday -- off

Thursday -- parts A and B

Friday -- parts C and D followed by the quiz

[2Peanuts]

I'm afraid I can't answer your questions directly because I supplemented the lessons with a lot of my own personal knowledge. (I worked for 10 years in the Deaf community and am proficient in ASL.) Also, I used the lessons with my 7th grader so we weren't doing them for credit. So, I'm sorry I can't answer your first question.

As for pacing, we did one lesson per week, using the divisions that Vicars provides (Part A, B, C, & D). If you don't know ASL, then I would recommend you watch the video of Vicars teaching the class. If there's a sign you don't understand, then you click through the vocab links in the lesson to find a snippet of just that sign. The story at the end is for students to practice using the language. It's so the flow of ASL syntax & grammar becomes more familiar to the students rather than the single sentences & words used in the lesson. It reminded me of those silly dialogues I had to learn in high school French. "Excuse me, where is the shoe store?" "It is down the street on the left, behind the train station." Because we all need to know where the shoe store is in Paris, right? ?

Hope this helps!

[Kendall]

so far on the transcripts (2 kids) I have used ASL 1 as a semester credit,ASL 2 as the second semester, etc. I could have done the transcript as ASL 1 for the whole year and just used the lifeprint 1 and 2. All of that is arbitrary.  But you could certainly go by time instead and just give credit for ASL 1 at the end of the number of hours you plan to use. Lifeprint ASL 1 would not have lasted 120 hours for my kids.  I would tend to advise (depending on personality of child) to have a set amount of time a day that they work well on it and call it a year when you have the hours finished regardless of where you are.

I did not like the quizzes because they took so long and there was so much dead time in them that added up. We did not use them.

My kids did the fingerspelling practice in addition to the lessons. If you click on each word/phrase/sentence link in the lesson after watching the video, it could take quite a bit of time and then it could last a year.

I didn't keep track that well of what my kids did with the lessons. We did practice asking the questions back and forth and also practiced just by using ASL whenever we could in the house (Still do). 

Doing it together will be fun!  

My daughter just said that she would watch the video and then practice signing the phrases. She only clicked on the link if she wasn't sure about it, but that usually the video was enough. 

It has been several years since I have had kids using it, but 2 of them are using it this year so I might have better answers for you in late August when we have been at it awhile.