Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Communication St. (not a one way)

So since most of you who read my blog are not around Josh on a regular basis but may want to communicate with him when you do see him here is a heads up: Josh, much to my frustration, does not want to use the ipad for regular communication. Instead he has been learning quite a bit of sign language. Don't get all excited, he still only uses one word of sign at a time so there is still quite a bit of guessing. Besides, I don't really like the fact that the only person he can talk to is me and deaf people. Not that I have anything against deaf people but my son won't understand them well enough and they him to have the guessing part work out. So yet again, I am the only one to understand it. SOOOOOO, I am encouraging any of you who will want to communicate with my son to learn sign language. He currently has gotten most of his signs from watching "Signing Time" which is a TV show on most local public broadcast channels (think PBS). Also, you can usually get the DVDs from the library. You could buy them but they are expensive so I wouldn't recommend it. If you live close enough you can borrow them from us. However you do it, try to at least recognize the signs when you see them and be ready for them to be a little off (his motor control isn't great). Josh has it in his head that I am the only one that understands him and can decipher what he is saying. Let's prove him wrong. Let's show him that as a family we can rally around him, he is important enough to know without an interpreter.

2 comments:

  1. which words does he know? (Even a list of the main ones would help.) I'd be sad to spend time memorizing a bunch of signs only to find out he doesn't know any of them and I don't know the ones he does know!

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  2. He watches signing time too so he is always learning new ones but here is a list of the most important to him right now: stay, please, thank you, name, game, run, play, tattoo (this one we looked up because he loves fake tattoos so much), table, drink, colors (all of them), stand, jump, dance, where, who, help, water, what, aunt, uncle, cousin, boy, girl, tree, sun, milk, candy, cheese, apple, friend, find, different, new, sad, angry, dog. He knows a bunch more and when I think that I know everything that he knows I say something/he sees something and next thing I know he is signing something new.

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