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January 21 to 25, 2013:   ”NO NAME CALLING WEEK” MYTH OF THE WEEK:  ”Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” ЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖЖ Enslow Publishers, Inc. Enslow Publishing was established in 1976 by Ridley M. Enslow. a veteran of several New York publishing houses.  Today, his two sons, Mark and Brian, run it.  Located …

ALA Editions announces Liven Up Baby and Toddler Storytimes with Sign Language with Kathy MacMillan, a new workshop that will take place on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 1pm EST.

Learn how to incorporate American Sign Language into your children’s storytime. This online, interactive workshops teaches participants to create programs that will be beneficial for children and parents alike.

Kathy MacMillan is a freelance writer, American Sign Language interpreter, librarian, and storyteller. She has contributed articles to Public Libraries, American Libraries, School Library Journal, Voice of Youth Advocates, and LibrarySparks, and is the author of Try Your Hand at This!: Easy Ways to Incorporate Sign Language into Your Programs (Scarecrow Press, 2006), A Box Full of Tales: Easy Ways to Share Library Resources through Story Boxes (ALA Editions, 2008), and Storytime Magic (with Christine Kirker, ALA Editions, 2009).

Registration for this workshop is available at the ALA Store. The workshop will last 90 minutes and takes place at 1pm EST on Wednesday, March 23.

“Fifty years before Helen Keller, there was Laura Bridgman”–so reads the tagline for this book: She Touched the World: Laura Bridgman, Deaf-Blind Pioneer by Sally Hobart Alexander and Robert Alexander. Here are the facts about this book:

*Middle-grade biography
*Laura Bridgman is the subject
*Rating: This book is an award-winner!

Short, short summary: This book is the story of Laura Bridgman who is known as one of the first American deaf and blind children to get an education in English. Her teachers used tactile sign language and also words printed with raised letters corresponding to objects such as keys, spoons, and knives. The book includes several photos and quotes and spans Laura’s life from the time she is born to her death at 60 years of age.

So, what do I do with this book?

1. Before reading, ask students what they know about Helen Keller. Most children in 3rd-5th grades will have learned about Helen Keller before, but probably not Laura Bridgman. Explain the connection between the two to create interest in reading about Laura and her remarkable life and education.

2. Pioneer is a word that has many meanings, but most kids will think of it as the people traveling in covered wagons. After they finish reading about Laura Bridgman, ask them to write a paragraph with specific examples from the text of how she is a pioneer.

3. Ask students to compare and contrast a time they learned something with how Laura learns to communicate.

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By Anatoly Liberman

I am looking at the backlog of questions and comments for two months (there were no monthly gleanings at the end of August) and, first of all, want to thank everybody who has read the blog, reinforced my conclusions, disagreed or corrected me, given additional information, and asked questions.

Can American Sign Language (ASL) be viewed as having literacy?  Words mean what people make them mean, and perhaps literacy can be understood in senses not familiar to the majority of speakers.  The term computer literacy has almost turned literacy into a synonym for skills, and yet literacy presupposes an ability to read and write.  Someone who can do neither is illiterate.  Oral societies that later introduced a script are sometimes referred to as preliterate.  From this point of view, ASL does not look to me as a language having literacy.  I am not a specialist in ASL and argue from the position of an outsider.  All the deaf and mute Americans I know use English as their medium of written communication, even though they consider ASL their native language.

Is Standard English pronunciation a viable concept? I think it is, even if only to a point.  People’s accents differ, but some expectation of a more or less leveled pronunciation (that is, of the opposite of a broad dialect) in great public figures and media personalities probably exists.  Jimmy Carter seems to have made an effort to sound less Georgian after he became President.  If I am not mistaken, John Kennedy tried to suppress some of the most noticeable features of his Bostonian accent.  But perhaps those changes happened under the influence of the new environment.  In some countries, the idea of “Standard” has a stronger grip on the public mind than in North America.  I have often heard people remarking: “He speaks beautiful French” or “Her Italian is wonderful,” and those remarks referred not only to style and vocabulary but also to the speaker’s delivery.  Additionally, some local accents are usually called ugly, though from a linguist’s point of view, an ugly native accent is nonsense.

This brings me to some questions of usage.  Discussing lie and lay for the umpteenth time would be even less productive than beating ~ flogging a dead horse.  In some areas, the distinction has been lost, and so be it.  English has lost so many words in the course of its history that the disappearance of one more will change nothing.  So lay back and relax.  The same holds for dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, and the rest.  I only resent the idea that some tyrants wielding power make freedom loving people distinguish between lie and lay.  Editors and teachers should be conservative in their language tastes.  In works of fiction, characters are supposed to speak the way they do in real life, but in other situations it may be prudent to lag behind the latest trend as long as several variants coexist.

A curious detail of usage is the word dilemna.  Our correspondent asked why several decades ago this form had become current on the East Coast.  I confessed that I had never heard about this monster, but later searched the Internet.  It turned out that some other people are as ignorant of it as I was, but I discovered that dilemna had invaded the English speaking world from New Zealand to Canada.  Some children were even taught to pronounce -mn-.  Here is probably a situation that will provoke no disagreement: dilemna is unacceptable.  The first suggestion that comes to mind is that someone decided to change the spelling of dilemma under the influence of words like column,

What Rilla’s saying at the end there is “With Alex, Leah, and Hopkins.” Totally unprompted, I swear.

When I watched our Christmas 2005 video the other day, the bit that gave me the biggest pang of nostalgia was watching Wonderboy signing away. He hardly signs at all anymore, now that he talks so much. I’m thrilled with his verbal speech, but I really miss the signing. It’s funny to think back on how much ASL dominated our lives (in a rich and satisfying way) for a couple of years there, and now our use and pursuit of sign language has slipped to the back burner, becoming something of a hobby rather than a daily necessity. Jane still wants to certify as an ASL interpreter someday, and every few months we pull out our materials and learn another chunk of vocabulary and grammar. There are community college courses we might take next year. It’s a beautiful and important language, and I don’t want to let it go, even if our boy doesn’t need rely on it for communication the way he once did.

And of course the Signing Time DVDs remain in great demand with my little people, as the video above attests. With Rilla, we’re seeing all the benefits of sign language we saw with the first three girls—because rudimentary ASL was a part of our baby & toddler life from the get-go, long before we had a Wonderboy or knew he had hearing loss.

Here are some old posts singing the praises of our favorite kiddie DVDs:

It Must Be a Sign

Something Else to Buy Instead of Curriculum: Signing Time

Originally posted in June 2006.

Wonderboy’s hearing loss came as a shock to us. Sure, we knew he’d failed the newborn hearing test. Three times. But those rounds of testing were administered in the NICU where there is always a humming and beeping of background noise, and the tech had told us that ambient noise could skew the test results. We had more pressing things to worry about: his (minor) heart defect; his recovery from omphalocele repair surgery; the genetic testing necessary to determine whether he had a potentially serious chromosomal syndrome; the fact that he was going home on oxygen. At least he was going home, and we tucked the hearing-test business to the back of our minds and focused on the immediate business of keeping him alive.

Every month the health department sent us a letter reminding us to have the hearing screen repeated. Sure thing, we said, just as soon as things slow down a bit. We were constantly having to take him to some specialist or another. The chromosome study came back negative: his medical issues were not due to a genetic syndrome. He was just one of those babies for whom something goes slightly awry early on in utero, resulting in a number of physical abnormalities down the line. An MRI had shown brain abnormality, but what its effects would be, no one could say: time will tell, they said. (They are still saying that.) He had extremely high muscle tone (hypertonia) and could not stretch out his arms and legs very far. His fists were tightly clenched. He started physical therapy at four months of age. He required emergency surgery to repair a double hernia with incarcerated bowel. The cardiologist was still keeping a close eye on his heart. The hearing test would just have to wait.

Besides, we told ourselves, we know he isn’t deaf. He startled to loud noises. Of all the things there were to worry about, we really didn’t think hearing loss was one of them.

But by six months, we had suspicions. He wasn’t babbling. He didn’t turn his head at the sound of my voice, lighting up with recognition before even seeing me, as our other children had. We took him back for another hearing screen.

He failed.

The audiologist said something about a “mild” hearing loss, and I thought that didn’t sound too bad. “Oh, no,” she told me, hastening to set me straight. “It isn’t like a ‘mild’ fever. ANY hearing loss is serious. Most speech sounds fall at the bottom of the scale, so if you have any hearing loss at all, you’re going to have trouble with speech.”

As it turned out, Wonderboy’s loss was a bit more serious than the audiologist first thought. Further testing placed him at the “moderate” level on the scale of mild—moderate—severe—profound. Unaided, Wonderboy’s ears can’t detect sounds softer than 50 decibels. Most speech sounds fall in the 20-decibel-or-lower range. Our little guy can hear vowel sounds, the louder middles of words, but few of the consonants that shape sound into speech. For Wonderboy, people probably sound a lot like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Wah-WAH-wah-wah-waahh-wah. We learned about the speech banana: the area on a graph that shows where speech sounds fall in the decibel and frequency ranges. Wonderboy can’t hear sounds above the horizontal 50 line on that chart.

(More or less. He has a sloping loss which is slightly better at the lower frequencies.)

By his first birthday he was wearing hearing aids, and what a huge difference we could see! Aided, he tests around the 20-decibel range. He hears and understands a great deal of what we say. He is two and a half years old now, and he is finally beginning to add some consonant sounds to his verbal speech. Daddy used to be “Ah-ee” and now he is “Gaggy.” (This cracks me up. You can get a lot of mileage out of calling your husband Gag.) Grandpa is Amp-Ha. Wonderboy’s baby sister is “Gay-gee.” As you can see, he doesn’t have a B sound yet. His M is perfect, though; I have been Mommy, clear as a bell, for over a year.

But Wonderboy’s verbal speech is only part of the picture. His actual vocabulary is enormous, thanks to sign language. We are huge fans of the Signing Time DVDs. He uses a combination of sign and speech; we all do. Although it appears he will be primarily a verbal person as he gets older, sign language will always be an important second language for him. Hearing aids, incredible as the technology is nowadays, don’t do you any good at the swimming pool. Just for instance.

Hard of hearing. It used to be a phrase that conjured up in my mind the image of a grizzled old man with an ear trumpet. What? What’d ye say? Speak up, lad! (Apparently he is a grizzled old Scotsman.) Now it applies to my son. Words pop up on a TV screen, “closed captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing,” and I’ll give a little mental jump: Oh! That means Wonderboy!

Watching our children learn to speak is one of the great delights of parenthood. We mothers tend to collect their funny pronunciations, their experimentation with the meanings of words. This time around, my joy has been doubled, for I get to see communication unfold in two languages. His funny little toddler signs are just as endearing as any “helidopter” or “oapymeal” ever uttered by a two-year-old. (”Oapymeal” was one of Jane’s. It meant oatmeal. I served it often just to hear her say it.)

There are some links to American Sign Language resources in the sidebar of my old site. (I’ll set up a page here soon as I get a chance.) I can’t say enough about the wonders and benefits of ASL, not just for deaf and hard of hearing children, but for all babies and toddlers, especially those with any type of speech delay. ASL is a beautiful, nuanced language, a visual poetry. I count myself privileged to have been put in the way of learning it. Jane is determined to certify as an interpreter someday, and I have to admit I’m a little jealous. I wish I’d learned at her age.

Wonderboy makes a fist and touches a knuckle to his cheek, wiggling the hand. “Ah-hul!” he shouts. Apple, in two languages. The speech banana? We’ll get there, one way or another.

*Audiogram image courtesy of GoHear.org.

Tags: special needs children, American Sign Language, baby sign language, hard of hearing