Signing Savvy, Your Sign Language Resource

Children's books are often great learning tools because they are visual, help build a child's vocabulary, and kids love them! I use them all the time in my teaching to young students. Now, with Signing Savvy and a bit of creativity, you can create a sign language version of your favorite children's books to further enhance their learning potential. Below is an example of a very well known children's classic that has been modified to show the signs. To create this book, ...

Teachers, I know you are all enjoying your summers and don\'t really want to think about \"Back to School\" just yet, but I thought I would take the time, over the next few blog posts, to highlight some of the cool things you can do with the Signing Savvy features to add a little creativity to your ...

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 ...

They just do! I often used cooking as a teaching tool the classroom. Once my students got the skills in place through our dramatic play (described earlier), we would do cooking activities in the classroom and invite others in to join us and taste our creations. While cooking, we would again use our digital camera to document the steps in the process. We would print off these photos later and have the students put them in order (sequencing) and add ...

How frustrating it must be as a parent to have your deaf child come home and have no idea what has just happened to them for the last seven hours. The child may do their best to communicate their day but many of them have JUST learned the vocabulary themselves and reproducing them once they get home for mom and dad is difficult to say the least. One idea that I used that was very successful was a daily journal ...

Dramatic play is such an underrated way for children to learn. I had so much fun interacting with my preschool deaf children and watching how they would communicate through dramatic play. It opened the doors for so many teaching/learning opportunities. One of my favorites was making restaurant menus including all the plastic play food we had in our dramatic play kitchens and creating our own cafe. The pages would include a digital photo of the food along ...

In many preschool or early childhood classes you walk into the room and you see the written words for different objects around the room everywhere. A chair has the word CHAIR on it, the cupboards are marked with the words PUZZLES, GAMES, PAINT etc... to indicate their contents, all in an effort to teach the children the written words for the different objects from their environment that they interact with everyday. To teach signs, do the same thing! You ...

Research has shown that a child's muscles in the hands and fingers develop at a faster rate than those in the mouth and jaw. Basically this shows us that a child is better equipped at a young age to sign before they can speak. Because of this many people are choosing to teach their infants to use sign language as an early form of communication. It has been known to cut down on the amount of frustration on the part ...