Signing Savvy, Your Sign Language Resource

Many people talk to me about their frustrations with fingerspelling and want suggestions on how to improve their receptive skills when it comes to reading fingerspelling. My suggestions tend to follow a lot of the same rules that apply to teaching a child to read: Practice, practice, pratice...the more you work on reading other people's fingerspelling, the better you will get. Everyone's fingers are different so it is important to practice with many different partners in order to experience all the ...

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 ...

Many people have asked how to sign things that say one thing but mean something else. This happens a lot in the English Language! Some Examples: It's raining cats and dogs!, or You look really sharp today. Now as native users of the English language, we know that neither cats or dogs are falling from the skies .nor is the person in the second sentence looking rather pointed. These are concepts that people who are learning English as a ...

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 ...

Consider the following sentences: I won’t stand for this! You need to stand up please. This flag stands for freedom. In each of these statements the word STAND is used. It is spelled the exact same way, pronounced the exact same way, yet it has VERY different meanings in each of it’s uses above. Now one form of sign language, Signing Exact English, would tell you to sign the word STAND the same in all three sentences because of their 2 out of 3 ...

My name is John. Yes, I am the guy in the blue shirt shown in the videos on Signing Savvy. Since the launch of the Signing Savvy site last January, I have had several people ask me about my background. I learned to sign at a young age, not because I was deaf, but because I had a deaf neighbor and friend who I wanted to communicate more effectively with. From this point forward, learning to sign and communication ...

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 ...

When signing, it does not matter if you sign as left-hand or right-hand dominant. The biggest thing to remember is to pick which hand you want to use as the dominant hand and stick with it. You should not switch back and forth between dominant hands. Most signers will be able to understand your signs no matter which hand you use as the dominant hand. I am actually left-handed but choose to use my right hand as the more dominant hand ...