Working on signs

Incorporating sign language into our daily routine has been very difficult for us as a family. After using only our voices to communicate for roughly the past 29 years, Ben and I have to really work on signing to Abigail. Remembering to do this is one of the most difficult hurdles we have to overcome. While our signing vocabulary is expanding every day, we still are not signing to each other or to Benjy regularly. We often forget to use our signs in key teaching moments like at dinner or bath. Our hearing therapist and deaf mentor had some great ideas that we are going to implement over the next week to help us get comfortable with signing:

1. Establish a quiet time at dinner--even if just for ten minutes use only your signs to communicate. If this means all you say is please and thank you or dinner's good--that's fine. Abigail's first language is visual and she will be focused intently on your visual communication.
2. Put of sign flash cards in various areas of the house that can serve as key teaching areas for both Abby and Benjy--the bath, the play room, the dinner table, the mudroom. Each area can emphasize 1 or 2 signs to start and the cards will serve as reminders to use our signs as well as our voices to communicate.
   
3. Sign to each other and to your family--if you don't know a word, oh well! The more you practice, the more natural signing will become to you.

We plan to put these techniques to practice over the next few weeks and hope that it will help us to sign more often. Learning sign language is hard, but remembering to use when you're hearing is even harder.