When I was around 11 or 12, during one of the rare times when I was allowed to eat lunch with the other girls at school (i.e. they didn't pick their plates up and move to another table when I sat down with them), Juliet Phillips decided to show off her skills at the British Sign Language Alphabet. I don't know why, exactly, but that single demonstration stuck in my mind, and when I went home that night, I taught it to my mother.
I'm not sure if my mother picked it up as quickly as I did, but from that moment on, for several years, I would silently sign out for her what had happened at school that day, in great detail, and she seemed to understand. Not because I disliked talking to her, you understand, or because speech was difficult. Neither of us was hard-of-hearing. No, it was the challenge of a different mode of communication - it added a certain je ne sais quoi to our end-of-day debriefings.
Although I have rarely used it since those days, I've never forgotten it. A chance remark in chat this evening brought those moments to mind, and I managed to find the following tutorial video on YouTube. Pay close attention now - my next blog might just consist of a video with me signing out my prose!
And if you're having trouble communicating with your own school-aged children, why not try something a little different, like we did? I actually taught my mother how the binary number system worked ... silently!
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I learned the sign language alphebet just by watching the other girls in middle school sign to each other. (The ones that never would sit anywhere near me in the lunch room, lol)
ReplyDeleteI never forgot it.