Deborah,
I really wanted to respond to your questions. It's great to see so much
interest there is SignWriting. Before I took on the task of homeschooling
my daughter. I was a Medicaid consumer trainer. I had several parts to my
job but one of the parts was to train disabled adults in living skills. I
really wish I had SignWriting. It would have made my job easier. I think
(as I'm sure you know) each child is an individual and will take to
SignWriting in their own time. I'm sure there will be children who don't
like it at first, change can be scary. I think the children who love to read
or are very visually stimulated are the children that just don't want to put
it down. My daughter is the same. It's very exciting to see her reading and
understanding what she is reading. I really don't think it takes a lot of
history w/ASL for a Deaf child to understand it. We visited Pastor Detloff's
church ( the church for the Deaf) he uses SignWriting, What a great
experience we had. The best part of the visit was my child was following
along wonderfully. She does not have strong ASL skills due to the fact
until Nov. she was in a SEE (Sign Exact English) program. I have since
incorporated ASL in my lessons.. ASL is her language and she understands it.
I was nervous trying to incorporate ASL, because I'm a hearing parent. Also
not an native Signer but I found I had to do very little to explaining she
understands ASL much easier then English.. I'm an advocate of everyone
trying to Sign, so I think anyone who is participating with Deaf children
should at least know some signs. It really does make it very hard on a
child if the person that is helping them with a project doesn't know Sign
Language... Most likely in that case the children will help that person
learn Signs. I'm not sure how the SignWriting would work without Sign
Language skills.
I hope this helps you,
Best Wishes.
Dawn McReynolds
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