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Signing With Babies And Children: May 2011

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Friday, May 27, 2011

What Do You Remember?

Dale Cone of Experince:

Edgar Dale (April 27, 1900 – March 8, 1985) was an American educationist who developed the famous Cone of Experience. He made several contributions to audio and visual instruction, including a methodology for analyzing the content of motion pictures. He was a professor of education at Ohio State University.

In 1933 Dale wrote a paper on how to effectively create a High School film appreciation class. This paper has been noted for having a very different view of adolescent interaction with films than that taken by the Film Control Boards of the time.
[Source: Wikipedia].


Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Click and ShINe!





we are SO proud to present our NEW LOOK, NEW FEATURES, NEW LINKS!

SignShine's Team




Sunday, May 8, 2011

On Being Mom by Anna Quindlen


My Mom - Pure Love


to my mom--- who is my real hero and my real expert:









"If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they everexisted. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin.


ALL MY BABIES are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.


What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.


Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything.

One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is toilet trained at 3, his brother at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shiftin certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.


How silly it all seems now, the obsessing about language acquisition and physical milestones, the riding the waves of normal, gifted, hyperactive, all those labels that reduced individuality to a series of cubbyholes.


But I could not help myself. I had watched my mother casually raise five children born over 10 years, but by watching her I intuitively knew that I was engaged in the greatest and potentially most catastrophic task of my life. I knew that there were mothers who had worried with good reason, that there were children who would have great challenges to meet.

We were lucky; ours were not among them. Nothing horrible or astonishing happened: there was hernia surgery, some stitches, a broken arm and a fuchsia cast to go with it. Mostly ours were the ordinary everyday terrors and miracles of raising a child, and our children's challenges the old familiar ones of learning to live as themselves in the world. The trick was to get past my fears, my ego and my inadequacies to help them do that.


I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.


me, first grade
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons or the first two seasons. What was I thinking?


But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.


Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-o-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out.

I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were".

Happy Mother's Day,
etel



Saturday, May 7, 2011

Teach Baby Sign Language: How to Sign Mother's Day!



The first time your baby says mom is so special, and the first time she signs MOM is even more amazing!!

We would love you to share with us pictures and videos of YOUR baby signing MOMMY, or even making the approximation to the sign. So sweet!!

I want to share with you a short video of my son when he was 16 months old, signing to his sister, 4 1/2 years old: MAMA!!

Enjoy These sweet little kids who sign MOMMY; and send us YOUR picture:



Happy Mother's Day !

etel

etel leit, MS

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Using Sign Language to Tell a Story is a Wonderful Way to captivate the young listener.

So many of today’s children rely on film or video to hold their interest. By encouraging children to listen to a story, you are helping the child develop sharper, more accurate and effective listening skills. Start off with short stories that will captivate their interest. Include the listener as the protagonist. Add humor, or suspense and allow the listener’s imagination to create and embellish as his mind absorbs the words. Add sign language as a tool to help engage the listener. Children are captivated by the visual language. Instead of providing the picture to the child through videos and film, use sign language to allow the listener to engage with the storyteller and create the visual picture in his/her own mind. Not only does sign language help engage the listener and allow the child’s imagination to create, but it also helps the listener retain the information.


In summary, by having your child simultaneously process visual and auditory languages, you will be helping him/her to develop sharper listening skills, become more imaginative, and develop ways to better remember the details of the story.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

A Few Signs for Countless Moments of Play

As I sit down and enjoy the interaction with my one year old son, I realize that most of the simplest games we play together, usually involve one or more of these signs below:

Where
More
Again
In | Out
On | Off
All Done

Some examples of games involving these signs include:
* a container full of shapes are near by... pouring the shapes out, you sign "in." Put the shape "in." As your child enjoys the essence of either putting the shape in the correct "shape hole" or merely throwing the shape into the container, sign "in" and say "in." And use this same process with the sign "out" of course when the shapes are scattered all over the floor again.

* bathtime is in play. As the bubbles surround your child, you put the toy in the water and sign "where?" "Where" is your toy? Then some bubbles are placed on your child's hand, and you encourage him to put the soap "on" his head as you wash his hair (taking this time to learn tummy, nose, cheeks... all those fun places to place bubbles "on"). You ask "all done" when bathtime is over and sign let's get "out."

* laying on your back, it's time for airplane as you lift your child into the air upon the tops of your feet. As your child goes down for a landing, you sign "again?" Not to your surprise, your child is readily awaiting his lift off (signing "up" and "down" may be a little tricky as I'm not sure whether or not your airplane rides encourages hand free landings^_^).

* the sun is out. It's time to go outside. "Where's" your shoes? Can you put them "on." Sign "on" as you encourage your child to put his shoes on. Hide the other shoe behind your back and ask "where" is your shoe? As your child is done playing outside, take the shoes off and sign "off." This can be done with your child's jacket and hat too (taking this opportunity to sign "inside" and "outside" as well).

* while in a tickle war, you stop for a moment to sign "more." Do you want "more?" The tickle war goes on for countless minutes of laughter as you both can't get enough... until finally you're both "all done" as you take this moment to sign "all done."

Enjoy the opportunities of play with your children and enjoy signing along the way.

Written by Shawna Tran.

American Sign Language Browser
Signing Savvy Dictionary
note: Signing Savvy only allows you to browse 5 signs at a time if you are not a paying member.
Although if using the ASL Browser, once clicking on a word and viewing the video there, you are able to click on "View larger sign language videos of ____."