Hey so I thought I'd talk about something unexpected.
My son is now at 2.5.0 and by now you might expect him to be talking, well you'd be right he does talk but then he never says the word again try as we might, he only says mum and dad. The rest of the time I attempt to decipher his various grunts shouts and cries which is an art into itself.
As this community knows, there is more than one way of doing something and as lockdown hit we needed a way to save us all the frustration. To teach him to talk my partner and I have been learning to talk in sign language (BSL), the process is just so, I need a word for this, let's look it up in the app. Our son has a book or 3 on the subject as well, I have caught him sitting there teaching himself!
Anyways why BSL? It's activating the brains language bits and bobs in a way that allows him to associate shapes to words, it's also teaching him that 2 things can mean the same thing.
Why you should learn it. It is going to help you by raising your memory and IQ, allow you to make friends with people you normally might struggle to do so. You can communicate ideas faster and more visually and also it's a fun challenge!
Oh and when your brushing your teath you can still talk.
Top comments (11)
I am a native BSL user, it is my main language since birth and BSL has been the main language in our family for 5 generations continuously. I give praise to those who use it for their children to improve early cognitive communication and boose their receptions. Another positive thing is the ability to converse from 100 metres away, through the glass without any sounds and the ability of squashing multiple sentences into a simple quick burst of signs.
Kudos 🙌🏼
Nice to meet you marcus, I'm currently able to sign maybe 20 words and my son, 26, which I'm still working out, as I say he's got his books. I am excited to get faster and you are right, it's way more efficient, I actually can't keep up with myself yet. Long distance must be super useful!
My partner wears aids and is getting noticably worse so there is a duel purpose, but mostly I think it's a wonderful language. My son likes to say biscuit a lot. 🤣
Can I ask are there any code specific signs other than programmer or shall I work on my alphabet?
Nice to meet you too! There is a sign for programmer but we use alphabets for specific codes and languages so you're on the right track there. My advice is to keep practising the alphabets and go from there it will be much easier to pick up the signs and if there's no sign for a specific word we fingerspell it 🤗
Thanks for the article. It could be useful for my son as well.
Do you have some recommendations on where to start?
There's a book called my first signs with an
ISBN 978-1-904550-04-4
Google that and you should see an illustrated book that's sort of like a soundboard only it's a book and in sign. We sort of just started doing a new sign every day only when he wanted to and preferably when he was around the thing we where teaching him. If nothing else he sometimes uses to book to point at what he wants to get biscuits and use the toilet etc.
I'm still growing so I can't tell you exactly how it worked but it sort of just happened, my partner and I where fully committed so that helped and we use the app 'sign bsl' it's okay as an app but I'm sure you all could do a great job on something like this.
Thanks so much, I'm going to check this out.
I certainly can recommend some books as soon as I get him off to bed
I was just thinking about learning this today. What is the app you use?
Sign BSL on play.
I needed to do this with my eldest daughter too (who is now 12), it was a great way to get her communicating. Best of luck with it and I think you can now sign more words than I can remember!