Question:
For those who sign with your kids:
How did you learn sign? Did your early intervention pay for classes, or did you
learn as your kids learned (how did they learn?)
I've been lucky, and been taught for free by a friend, but she can't do it
anymore and I'd love to continue - I don't want Aidan getting ahead of me!
Answer:
Isn't it a kick that at the beginning everyone says kids with DS travel the
same developmental path but go a bit slower, and then we find that they still
don't go slow enough so that we can keep up with them!
If I had been working as hard as my son during all his physical therapy as a
little one, and kept up with him in little league, soccer, and tae kwon do -
you'd be watching me at the Olympics right now ;-).
All my son's therapists and teachers used the types of sign language they had
learned in school, each one a bit different from the next, so I used the
Signing Exact English book when he was small. I took several ASL courses, my
favorite being the one the wife of a man who was deaf taught at an Early
Intervention Center whose director was deaf. It was handy knowing a bit of ASL
because people in the grocery store would see me signing and come up to have a
conversation. At first, unless they wanted a cracker etc, I could not talk with
them. They were quite patient and showed varying degrees of a sense of humor
even before I learned enough to explain why I was signing. One family in our
neighborhood had fabulous garage sales and would always show me anything
imperfect if I was interested in purchasing a toy.
Something I found rather painful in learning about the community of individuals
who use sign language was how they felt about family members who would not
learn sign to communicate with them. Reading their history I was appalled to
learn that at schools where the focus was on speech and lip reading, they would
break the students' fingers if they caught them signing to one another in the
dorms. Argh!!!!!!!!!!
In response to the original question, other than the free sign language class
at the EIC, I took classes available in the community and paid for them myself.
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