After spending time in my Link2Practice class, I realized the importance of incorporating sign language while teaching. This is especially helpful when students are learning French or another language.
For my Free Inquiry project I decided to learn simple signs that can easily be incorporated in the class. My initial learning goals are as follows.
- Hello
- Goodbye
- Thank you
- The alphabet
- Check understanding
- My name is
- Bathroom
- Water
- Who/what/where/when/why/how
- School subjects
This image from Google Creative Commons is a very helpful resource that I have been using to learn sign language. As of right now (Sunday, September 22), I feel that I know about half the alphabet. Specifically, A, B, C, E, G, I, J, L, M, N, O, R, V, W, Y, Z.
The basic signs that I learned this week are thank you, yes, no, nice to meet you, school, with, I love you, water, and bathroom. I found a very useful website called lifeprint.com which is a visual dictionary for learning sign language. I also watched a video from the same website which showed one hundred basic signs. I chose to only learn a few this week so that I don’t get overwhelmed and retain more information. My method of learning these signs is through drawing pictures and repeating the sign over and over again.
Goals for next week:
- Practice incorporating the signs that I’ve learned into conversations
- Finish learning the alphabet
- Learn at least 5 more signs