St. Athanasius Academy:: Foreign Language for the littles

Monday, September 24, 2007

Foreign Language for the littles

I've been wanting to do a foreign language with my K, 2nd and 3rd graders, but when they don't really "get" their own language yet (grammar, etc), what's the point? Also, since my little ones are really kinesthetic, teaching them vocabulary just didn't seem to work.

Enter -- Signing Time. These dvds are fabulous! They're a bit expensive, but our library seems to have all the volumes, so we'll just keep checking them out. We watch one or two each day (they're 30 minutes each) and then at the end of the week, we return them and get a new "batch" out (that I've pre-requested). It's amazing how many signs the kiddoes have learned and remember!

We've already gone through:

There are a total of 13 volumes, with a Series two coming soon.

ETA (10/3): today we finished the last couple and will start back through the series. We'll just keep rotating the DVDs until the kids know all the signs.

These dvds are wonderful because there is lots of action -- with original songs, playing and lots of kids -- and Rachel (the mom) helps make the signs easy to remember by describing what the sign is. For instance, the sign for slide is two fingers sliding down the other hand's two fingers. Easy, huh?

The whole Signing Time thing is a family affair -- seems when Rachel's daughter was 2 they realized she was deaf. At the same time, her cousin Alex was born. The whole extended family decided to learn ASL and the rest, as they say is history. Rachel and her husband were professional musicians and Alex's mom is a songwriter. If you check out the Signing Time site, there are flashcards, song CD's and other helps for learning ASL. I'm sure we'll eventually get the set of DVDs -- but for now, we can rotate them from our library.

So, come join us for "signing time with Alex and Leah". It's a wonderful language to learn and fairly easy to teach little ones!