metaphortunate son (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
metaphortunate) wrote2013-01-28 08:42 pm
metaphortunate) wrote2013-01-28 08:42 pm
baby sign
Since people have asked, the story of the Junebug's signing:
Mr. E studied ASL for years, and though he would not say that he is fluent in it, he used to be able to "get by", though he's out of practice now. Still, he loves the language, and he wanted us to teach the baby sign. So he wanted me to take a class. He really wanted me to learn ASL so we could better teach the baby. And in a moment of weakness I agreed to take at least one semester of it. Related to something I was saying elsewhere: I had a moment of thinking, surely I will pull more organization out of my ass somehow and stretch my limits and Learn (it's good to acquire Knowledge, right?) and even though I don't want to, it'll just be one semester. Well, I got pregnant, and I was exhausted, and I was volunteering for FOGcon, and eventually I threw a giant shit fit over the fact that I did not WANT to spend a huge chunk of my last precious free time for six years or so taking an evening class in a language that I wasn't even slightly interested in. And I wasn't going to. Mr. E was obviously angry at me for refusing to do something that I had said I would. But I was angry because I felt like he had badgered me into it. And in the end I simply refused, and he couldn't make me, so there it lay.
In due time the Junebug was born. And then a friend of Mr. E's, who had had a baby about 3 months before us, asked if we wanted to take a baby sign class with them. There was this place that sort of did baby sign Tupperware parties: Mr. E's friend and his wife had six other couples round to their place once a week for a couple of months, and this guy - a hearing guy who had Deaf parents - showed up from the organization, with some songs to sign along to and some flash cards and such, and we had an hour or two of baby sign lessons. So we did it. And it was great. The Junebug and all the other babies were way too young to pick up any of it, of course. The guy taught the parents.
It was great largely just because it was a standing once-a-week social activity with other parents that we didn't have to plan or organize, and we got to see other people and their babies and how they were doing, and get out of the house, and so on. But also it turned out that in a fun social atmosphere I picked up a bunch of baby sign, and enjoyed it. So ever since then, because it became fun, I always used it with the baby, and am always asking Mr. E for more nouns, and the daycare uses it too, so the Junebug has picked up ASL nouns quite naturally. The daycare teachers are the ones who taught him the sign for "diaper".
I'm actually having a much harder time trying to get him to have some Spanish. :( Sign is easy because I don't have to do it instead of English, I can do it at the same time. I mean, I don't know the ASL for everything I say, but I can ask "Do you want some more raspberries, or are you all done with lunch?" and sign "raspberries" and "all done". I guess I could try to say everything twice, once in English once in Spanish. :( Gah, another chore to take on.
Mr. E studied ASL for years, and though he would not say that he is fluent in it, he used to be able to "get by", though he's out of practice now. Still, he loves the language, and he wanted us to teach the baby sign. So he wanted me to take a class. He really wanted me to learn ASL so we could better teach the baby. And in a moment of weakness I agreed to take at least one semester of it. Related to something I was saying elsewhere: I had a moment of thinking, surely I will pull more organization out of my ass somehow and stretch my limits and Learn (it's good to acquire Knowledge, right?) and even though I don't want to, it'll just be one semester. Well, I got pregnant, and I was exhausted, and I was volunteering for FOGcon, and eventually I threw a giant shit fit over the fact that I did not WANT to spend a huge chunk of my last precious free time for six years or so taking an evening class in a language that I wasn't even slightly interested in. And I wasn't going to. Mr. E was obviously angry at me for refusing to do something that I had said I would. But I was angry because I felt like he had badgered me into it. And in the end I simply refused, and he couldn't make me, so there it lay.
In due time the Junebug was born. And then a friend of Mr. E's, who had had a baby about 3 months before us, asked if we wanted to take a baby sign class with them. There was this place that sort of did baby sign Tupperware parties: Mr. E's friend and his wife had six other couples round to their place once a week for a couple of months, and this guy - a hearing guy who had Deaf parents - showed up from the organization, with some songs to sign along to and some flash cards and such, and we had an hour or two of baby sign lessons. So we did it. And it was great. The Junebug and all the other babies were way too young to pick up any of it, of course. The guy taught the parents.
It was great largely just because it was a standing once-a-week social activity with other parents that we didn't have to plan or organize, and we got to see other people and their babies and how they were doing, and get out of the house, and so on. But also it turned out that in a fun social atmosphere I picked up a bunch of baby sign, and enjoyed it. So ever since then, because it became fun, I always used it with the baby, and am always asking Mr. E for more nouns, and the daycare uses it too, so the Junebug has picked up ASL nouns quite naturally. The daycare teachers are the ones who taught him the sign for "diaper".
I'm actually having a much harder time trying to get him to have some Spanish. :( Sign is easy because I don't have to do it instead of English, I can do it at the same time. I mean, I don't know the ASL for everything I say, but I can ask "Do you want some more raspberries, or are you all done with lunch?" and sign "raspberries" and "all done". I guess I could try to say everything twice, once in English once in Spanish. :( Gah, another chore to take on.
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Anyway, one suggested aid: a simple picture dictionary, whether bi/trilingual or solely in the lang you want to use. Doesn't matter that he can't read it yet; it's to show that labels can be written in more than one way. Also, um, do you sing at all? I find that singing helps; so does playing kid-friendly songs in the target lang and singing along to encourage the child to sing along. Little kids can pick up a lot by rote. (It is hilarious and sad to hear my daughter repeat a distortion of my imperfect accent for my parents' respective first languages, but hey, some of it is dialect and some is true distortion; one is fine, the other at least theoretically fixable...by someone else.)
Are any of the daycare teachers Spanish-speakers, and if so, are the teachers allowed to speak langs other than English on the job? My daughter has picked up some Spanish because two out of three of hers speak it, plus a few classmates are from multilingual-including-Spanish households.
ETA One other thought, sorry (possibly I have too many thoughts about lang acq): IIRC he's coming up on the big bursts of cognition/speech/ear-processing, so if you do say things twice, I'd focus on the Spanish for awhile and do only partial glosses in English, or sometimes not bother with English at all. Most other people around him are speaking English, after all; it's not like he won't learn it.
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So you could skip straight to just talking to him in Spanish whenever you can remember, and I will bet he'll be fine.
(Full disclosure: older child is basically bilingual at this point, thanks to going on four years in a language immersion elementary. I could not be more pleased. Younger child bounced hard off the K teacher at the immersion school and had to be put in another classroom at an English-only program; I'm glad he's happier but worry he won't have the language skills his sister does.)
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When the kids do end up learning a second language, they'll probably wind up teaching it to me.
(Seems more than a little ironic given everything my grandparents did to make sure their daughters grew up speaking English and not own language. Hooray assimilation!)
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