Signing Savvy, Your Sign Language Resource

Earlier, I discussed how I used cooking as a classroom activity to engage my students in sign language education. Well if you cook, you have to shop!

Each week the students and I would pour over cookbooks picking out a recipe that might go along with a particular theme that we were studying at that time, such as traditional Thanksgiving foods in November, Valentine's cookies in February, etc... Sometimes it might just be something that sounded tasty. From that recipe we created a shopping list and we would go to the grocery store. We would shop for the various items and then take a digital photo with two students from the class in each photo. One student would be holding the product, while the other student signed the sign for the item.

The results were overwhelming for me as a teacher. The life-long skills that were being facilitated in the students were immediately noticable!

This type of activity became a large part of our preschool and early childhood program's curriculum. It caught the attention of a professor at Michigan State University and he wrote about it in his book, Literacy and Your Deaf Child: What Every Parent Should Know.

If I were doing this activity today, I would use the Signing Savvy word lists. With word lists, you could create a shopping list right on Signing Savvy. You could then use the word list to quiz the students on the signs before going to the store. At the store you could sign the item and see if the students could locate it. You could also print the signs from the word list and send home the vocabulary for the students' parents and families. Of course if the parents had Signing Savvy memberships, you could share your word lists with them so they could see the sign videos and follow along with their kids.