Teaching Simple Sign Language To Children.

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Growing Pains Regarding Children Communicating Skills.

Sound Value Educating Children Voicing Communicating.

Young kids have little or no control over their lives. Relating to others is one thing that begins to empower them.

That’s why it goes without saying, that children communicating goes hand-in-hand. You, the caregivers, are the most important influences in your toddlers worlds.

Connecting with you at an early age will feed them emotionally and intellectually.

More and more educational research confirms what wise parents have always known – you will establish the lasting foundation of your child’s physical, mental, and spiritual health by meeting all these needs during those first few years.

Mother and deaf daughter

And naturally, the time you share with your child will be of higher quality when you are more interactive.

My own children are all grown now. Now here are the grandchildren and sign language was never taught to them.

But they’re all understanding to the fact deaf children do exist in our society, and it’s also important to look out for the signs of going deaf.

They also understand that ‘our eyes’ are important in regards to non-verbal connection.

A TIME FOR UNDERSTANDING

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Our eye’s tend to look a little deeper to understand each other. This process would lead to a closer sense of connection.

I feel that by experiencing communication in this way, you tap a little deeper into the roots of parent/child bonding – the more dynamic your communication, the stronger your bond.

Parents who do learn early sign language, get incredible satisfaction. They enjoy teaching sign language to their toddlers at an early age.

Many who have used this system have expressed the delight they experienced a connection with their kids so early in their lives. Many parenting rewards are built on a foundation of good faith.

We found that our kids expressed themselves clearly when speech began. By clearly, I mean they were able to chose or search for the precise words to express their thoughts.

They followed a logical and systematic parents in expressing themselves.

This process would follow the same pattern as the way in which I had introduced a sign for an object or situation. Many youngsters continue to use signs after they begin speaking because it’s so much fun.

Uncle with partial deaf niece

While I have your attention, I’d like to offer a couple of suggestions.

When your children begin to speak, they will learn and use whatever words you give them.

Don’t underestimate their intelligence and memory.

Use correct and accurate words. Even if they cannot pronounce a word perfectly, they have heard it and will eventually use it in the correct context.

I knew a parent who would teach his son specific words for injuries, (bruise, cut, scrape, etc;).

They learned to distinguish the different types of injuries, while I noticed other kids their ages still said ‘ouch’ or ‘owie’ for all injuries. This is just an example; you can carry this idea through all vocabulary development.

Teaching your youngster sign, starting with a “baby” word for ‘wanting something,’ only to replace it later with a more sophisticated word , may be doing them a disservice.

BE A CONCERNED PARENT, BUT DON’T SMOTHER:

Children Communicating With Adults

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One last bit of advice: I know some parents who, with all good intentions, want to be such good parents that they over anticipate and meet their kid’s every need too readily.

The drawback here is that these youngsters rarely have an opportunity to express their needs.

Sometime between the first indication of need and the screaming stage is the opportunity to introduce signs.

This way, you can be most effective in helping your infants develop their ability to tell you exactly what they want.

Also, don’t ask your kid to sign out of context, perform for others, or compare your him or her to other ones.

Be careful not to show disappointment if your youngster chooses not to sign in a particular situation even if your kid has signed in a similar situation before.

Remember, don’t make signing with your baby a lesson, but use signs in your daily life as an augmentation to your speech. Don’t teach the signs, just sign. Let your baby discover.

Babies have control over their hands long before they develop the fine motor skills required for speech.

By teaching their infants to sign, starting as early as eight months, more and more parents, grandparents and caregivers are recognizing the many benefits of this early signing.

Baby attempts sign language

Scientific research is revealing that a baby can understand and express much more than what was previously thought possible.

More and more people are beginning to take advantage of these important findings.

Now you as a parent seeking additional knowledge, you can use these findings to tap into your baby’s astounding, capacity for understanding and enhance the bonding process by building an early foundation for effective connecting.

WANTING A NORMAL CHILD

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Producing a normal child is an important parental need. The motives may include biological instinct (preservation of mankind), self-esteem, social pressures, a wish to care for and nurture someone younger and more helpless, a wish to continue the family line, a desire to prove that one is competent, a need to undo one’s own bad experience as a child, and many others.

The effect of a child’s deafness on the family needs to be understood in light of these emotionally loaded motives.

Aside from the obvious reason that knowing the cause of their child’s deafness may influence how he or she is managed, parents (like all people) have a need to understand, and if possible to control, what happens to them.

After the shock of diagnosis, parents often fear that in some way they have caused the deafness. These parental fears roughly fall into two categories: things they might have done wrong, and things they may have neglected to do.

For example, those parents who emotionally rejected their child during the pregnancy (smoked too much, drink too much, engaged in sexual activity outside the times pronounced safe by their doctors, or tried to abort the unborn child), may feel guilty, although it is highly unlikely that any of these factors influenced the deafness.

Producing a child who is physically different often prompts feelings of inadequacy, especially if it is the first child. Knowing the cause of deafness is desirable and may help reduce doubts about the ability to cope with the loss.

Some families are very concerned with the question of genetics: which side of the family did it come from?

Will the hereditary tendency affect others in the family who may not yet be born – the brothers and sisters of this deaf child? Should children and communication ever become a problem?

These are questions that should be answered for the family by their physician or, if the situation is complex, by referral to a genetic counseling clinic.

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Check out these amazing tools designed to teach & promote quality, effective, integrated learning. Go to:

Self-esteem Elevation For Children Coaching Certification

Special Kids Learning Series CD:-Lets Go To

Toddler Talk: Techniques & Games – Proven Language Therapy Techniques

Creating Inclusive Learning Environment For Young Children: What To Do Monday Morning, 1st Edition

#HowDisabilitiesAffectChildren #SpeachAndLearningInTraining #HearingLossInAmerica #BabiesLearningSignLanguage

* Did you enjoyed this article? Please share it on your social media.

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AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE

When you buy something from this website, I may receive an affiliate commission.
These are my opinions and are not representative of the companies that create these products.
My reviews are based on my personal experience and research. I never recommend poor quality products, or create false reviews to make sales.
It is my intention to explain products so you can make an informed decisions on which ones suit your needs best.

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SIGNING AND LEARNING TOGETHER: 

From Darkness To Baby Signing Enlightens

Our understanding of the way that hearing impaired children interact with the world – essentially our view of their cognitive functioning – has always influenced the way that people think they should be educated, regardless of whether that understanding was accurate. It would be beneficial to families to first look into the Social Security programs offered. They offer programs that would help in regards to baby signing and working with a certified and qualified sign language interpreter.

They are committed to communicating effectively with the public, which includes providing meaningful access to all SSA activities, programs, facilities, and services to persons who are deaf, hard of hearing or have some form of a hearing disability.

The aforementioned situation has had a great influence on disabled learners for centuries, but there are two issues of particular relevance to parents and teachers today. One is that there are some non-hearing adults who view their educational histories, including their ‘parents and teachers’ obsessions with spoken language, as a form of oppression, if not abuse.

It’s easy to do for a deaf child to learn sign language. This is great when one speak on a communicative standpoint.

As often as not, however, the people who voice such views are hearing people rather than non-hearing people, or hearing impaired people talking about the lives of others rather than their own learning abilities.

It is difficult to convince such individuals that most parents and teachers have always done their best to educate hearing impaired children, but that society has long been ignorant about the potential of children with any disability – not just those who can’t hear.

The second consequence of the cognition – education linkage is that as our understanding of cognitive psychology and cognitive development has grown, the education of these children has become more evidence based (shown by research to be effective) and tailored to their strengths and needs.

Within the field of psychology, the shift away from viewing children’s knowledge as essentially the same as that of pigeons and rats did not occur until the late 1960’s.

That change from an emphasis on external behavior (referred to as behaviorism) to an emphasis on what goes on in the mind (cognitive psychology) was occurring at the same time that we were thinking that the gestural systems used by deaf individuals in the United States and elsewhere were really language.

Both shifts reflected changes in society and science consistent with the times, and it will be worth briefly considering the intertwining of psychology and deaf education that brought us to where we are today -that led to the writing of this article.

The historical connection between views of deaf children’s cognitive abilities and their understanding can be seen as involving three or four historical stages.

The first stage, which has been referred to as the hearing impaired as inferior, resulted from work in the early 1900’s that seemed to show that non-hearing children were not as intelligent as their hearing peers.

It was during this time that psychologist studying intelligence first developed nonverbal intelligence test precisely so that they could measure the intelligence of these children.

We understand today that much of that research was influenced by the research (and society’s) belief that spoken language was an essential component of human intelligence.

Nevertheless, some of their findings, like disabled children’s difficulty in remembering sequences of items that are not meaningfully connected and children communicating in sign language, are still obtained.

Boy discover sound during left ear hearing test.

Today, however, we have a much better understanding of what those results really mean.

The second stage in thinking about cognition and knowledge among non-hearing children has been labeled the deaf as concrete.

From the 1940’s to the early 1960’s, research on disabled children’s hearing, problem-solving and literacy skills was interpreted to indicate that they were doomed to be concrete and literal, living in the here and now, with little ability for abstract thinking.

And the time, most psychologist believed that deaf people who did not speak did not have any language, and they failed to recognize that it was the way that we were teaching hearing impaired children and limiting their early experience – and not their hearing loss – that was responsible for many of the research findings and observed academic limitations.

That’s why dealing with the hearing impaired is no longer seen as being less capable of abstract thought than hearing children, teaching continue to struggle with non-hearing children’s tendencies to behave in apparently concrete ways in academic and social situations.

It was not until the 1970’s that psychologist and educators arrived at the point that is referred to the deaf as intellectually normal. 

Armed with the new cognitive psychology and a refined understanding of intelligence, researchers began to examine relations among cognition, language, and knowledge in the hearing impaired and hearing children.

Rather than seeing these children as lacking something, they finally recognized the influence of hearing impaired children’s early language and social experiences on their development and showed that, in terms of intelligence, they were quite normal.

We now know that hard-of-hearing children are just as capable of superior knowledge as are their hearing peers, and that hearing loss does not result in any insurmountable educational barriers.

In essence, people have come to accept that difference does not mean deficiency – the newest stage in understandings of the cognition-linkage in hearing impaired children.

The hard-of-hearing and hearing learners may vary in their approaches to various task, differ in their means of communication, and have different knowledge organized in different ways without such differences being good or bad.

This perspective has led us to examine differences between non hearing and hearing students as a way to better understand the intellectual development of deaf children and optimize their experiences in educational settings.

It is with that perspective that we now examine mind skills and commemoration in deaf children.

But before I go on, let me point out that mind skills are different from mind absorption, although both are a part of the same whole.

Gaining understanding is the acquisition of new knowledge, whereas commemoration refers to the storage and retrieval of knowledge.

Being ‘superior by study’ is used broadly here to mean information not only about things and ideas but also skills, such as how to type or ride a bicycle, and extremely complex skills like reading.

LEARNING

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The main question generally raised among parents is, “How will deafness affect my child’s ability regarding a deeper understanding?

The key here will be understanding the foundations of this in terms of the knowledge and skills that non hearing children bring regarding mind context and how parents and teachers teach children to utilize their skills.

That is, what do hearing impaired children need to have in order to take advantage of educational opportunities and interventions, and how can we tailor our instructional methods to support them?

The society for research in child development could provide more additional information to help with those opportunities.

In seeking answers to these questions, parents and teachers often ask how non-hearing kids seeking knowledge compare to hearing ones.

Some people in our field believe that this is an inappropriate question and we should instead focus on deaf kid’s strengths and perhaps differences among the deaf as a function of language skills, school placement, parental hearing status, and so on.

Such an approach might make sense if we were dealing with children alone, but in a world where most deaf children have to compete in mainstream classrooms, it is essential that we understand ways in which their understanding, knowledge, and educationally relevant skills differ from the hearing children who will sit beside them.

Visual Skills

Babies born with less than normal hearing quickly learn to pay attention to the visual world: looking at facial movements of their caregivers, their gestures, and where they are looking- perhaps even before their caregiver realize the baby is can’t hear. 

Mother with hearing impaired daughter.

Although it is unclear exactly how that precedes, their learning skills (and the parts of their brains that deal with vision) consequently will develop somewhat differently than hearing babies for whom sights and sounds are usually connected.

Some scientist and practitioners claim that an emphasis on the visuals for babies with reduced hearing sensitivity might hinder their auditory skills.

Consistent with this view, auditory – verbal approaches to speech therapy, often include covering the speaker’s mouth so hard-of-hearing children have to learn to rely entirely on whatever hearing they have.

Being hard-of-hearing leads to children attending more to the visual periphery, therefore widening their knowledge of the visual field. This adaptation is important because it makes them more visually aware of what is happening around them.

Auditory Skills

Most of the research involving auditory skills among hearing impaired children is relatively recent, focusing on those with cochlear implants. While hearing aids and implants can help children hear better, children who use them still have to rely more on vision than do their hearing peers.

For them, visual and auditory skills can work together, providing mutually supporting or redundant sources of information. Auditory information can help them speech-read, draw their attention to visual information in the environment, and provide additional information about people and things.

With that said, this could mean that simultaneous communication would be beneficial for children with cochlear implants, but the issue has not yet been explored in any depth.

A variety of studies regarding the role of an audiologist and its position, along with the auditory and memory functions among children with cochlear implants has been conducted. Comparing them to hearing children, that research has not included deaf children who do not utilize implants, so it is difficult to draw any conclusions about deaf children in general.

Nevertheless, children with cochlear implants typically show shorter thought spans for auditory information because of speed of their internal speed (involved in memory rehearsal), like their external speech, is slower than that of hearing children.

Measuring (School) Skills

In some schools, such as the Better Hearing Institute, hearing impaired children’s learning, like hearing children’s learning, is usually evaluated in terms of the grades they receive on test, classroom work, and projects, as well as in overall yearly grades.

Assessment of children’s achievement, in contrast, typically relies on standardized test.

A variety of studies during the 1970’s reported that hearing impaired children with deaf parents scored higher on achievement test than did deaf children with hearing parents (even if they still lag behind hearing children).

Many people have concluded that such advantages were the result of early access to sign language, but that now appears not to be the case.

With regards to reading, parents who are able to provide their deaf children with effective access to through-the-air communication – signed or spoken – and to written language have children who are the best readers.

MEMORY

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Deaf and hearing children can often remember things equally, even though they differ in how they process new knowledge store it, and find it again.

In other cases, deaf and hearing children may remember the same amount of information but differ in which information they remember from something they have seen.

We thus see again that the ways in which non-hearing children learn may not be the same as the ways hearing children learn.

Thoughts of the mind typically is described in terms of two components, short & long term thinking. If you stop and think about one of your elementary school teachers, you will be retrieving that information from your memory bank and putting it into the ‘working‘ portion, or ‘work-space‘ where thinking goes on.

Long-term memory, then, is where you keep all of your thoughts, knowledge and skills. Short-term memory is where you have information that you are paying attention to right now.

New information has gone through the short-term memory part of your brain. Sometimes it gets there, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Bottom line: Children and adults who are fluent in a signed language have been shown to have better visual-spatial memory, regardless of whether they are deaf or hearing.

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Check out these amazing tools designed to teach & promote quality, effective, integrated learning. Go to:

Self-esteem Elevation For Children Coaching Certification

Special Kids Learning Series CD:-Lets Go To

Toddler Talk: Techniques & Games – Proven Language Therapy Techniques

Creating Inclusive Learning Environment For Young Children: What To Do Monday Morning, 1st Edition

#HowDisabilitiesAffectChildren #SpeachAndLearningInTraining #HearingLossInAmerica #BabiesLearningSignLanguage

* Did you enjoyed this article? Please share it on your social media.

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AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE

When you buy something from this website, I may receive an affiliate commission.
These are my opinions and are not representative of the companies that create these products.
My reviews are based on my personal experience and research. I never recommend poor quality products, or create false reviews to make sales.
It is my intention to explain products so you can make an informed decisions on which ones suit your needs best.

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MOODINESS.

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There are many behavior changes a child may experience as he or she goes through life. These are behavior issues related to feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and irritability. They can become problematic when a child is unable to control or appropriately express them.

Sometime deaf children have no way to name, categorize, or normalize the emotions they feel.

They need an “emotional education” to learn what it is that they are feeling (feeling signal), words and names for those feelings, and appropriate actions for expressing them.

Poor Ability To Identify Feeling States. Feeling states are the internal sensation of emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness, and fear.

If a deaf child, is taught to categorize feelings by words/signs, the feelings do not become overwhelming, frightening, and out of control.

When able to identify and acknowledge what they are feeling, the child is more likely to get the support he or she needs.

Children need ongoing instruction and assistance to manage their feelings effectively. I recommend using the following three-step process:

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1. Learning to recognize feeling signals by observing others and noticing others and noticing how an emotion feels in his or her own body. Examples are tightening of the jaw, clenching the fist, a fluttering in the stomach, and a flush of heat to the head.
2. Identifying and naming a feeling. Ask your child what a particular feeling signal indicates. “You got all red in the face, were you mad? embarrassed?”
3. Learning what to do with a feeling. You can help your child identify how an expression of a feeling can have positive or negative results.

Your child may have a particular physical makeup that makes her sensitive to touch, foods, noises, lightening, or gravity.

Because of the way your child’s central nervous system reads stimulation, he or she may exhibit emotional expression in a manner that seems extreme (e.g. the child hits if her hair is played with).

If you want to investigate this possibility further, contact an occupational therapist who specializes in sensory defensiveness and deafness.

Consider and rule out possible physical causes of your child’s mood, such as fatigue, hunger, or over-stimulation. Plan ahead in order to avoid situations that may frustrate a tired or overstimulated child.

Praise your child when he or she expresses herself appropriately. Be patient. As your child matures, so will his or her ability to identify, understand, and communicate his or her feelings.

You can assist in this process by experimenting with physical and verbal outlets for expressing feelings appropriately. Keep in mind his or her developmental skills and limitations.

MOOD ADJUSTMENTS

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Dream State

Have you ever awakened from a dream in which you were trying to escape someone or something frightening and your feet would not carry you to safety?

Or, you were trying desperately to get help and found that you no longer had a voice? Attempting to reach a destination, but unable to find your way?

I would imagine that your relief has been as great as mine when, upon awakening, the realization has finally crept in that it was “only a dream.”

What, you may ask, does all this have to do with moodiness in young children? First, I would like to ask that you keep in mind the feelings produced by the dream experience: the frustration, helplessness, fear, and vulnerability.

We, as adults, can find relief in the discovery that these experiences were only dreams. But, for children, this experience is not just a dream but their day-to-day reality.

At no other time in one’s life are needs so great and skills so few as in early childhood. Beginning in infancy, a child is entirely helpless and dependent upon the instincts of caretakers.

We must guess, when a deaf infant cries, just what is the cry communicating. Is it hunger, a need to be held, or a diaper in need of changing?

THE LEARNING CURVE

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Teaching a deaf child to manage moods and value feelings is to teach a child two of the most significant self-esteem builders.

After all, we all feel better about ourselves when we “behave” and are pleasant. Likewise, self-esteem grows when a child learns that feelings are to be respected and listened to, not shamed and dismissed.

Partially deaf boy playing baseball with dad.

Our nerve-endings, when they properly develop, are our best protectors against serious injury.

If we were to touch a hot stove, a quick message would be sent to our brain signaling pain and an equally quick response would cause us to remove our hand to prevent further injury.

In the same way, feelings become our best protectors against harm of other sorts. A child who learns to respect inner feelings and instincts, will know when a playground bully is out of line.

They’ll talk and complain to adults about being bullied, and ultimately, look for new playmates.

A child whose feelings have not been nurtured may dismiss uncomfortable feelings and endure uncomfortable circumstances.

Similarly, our feelings teach us about that which feels good and rewarding. They becomes a “barometer” to be relied upon, ever informing us of our needs, likes, dislikes, dangers, and pleasures.

The calibration of this fine tool begins in early childhood. It requires a delicate balance of empathy and limits, the willingness to “listen” to that which words cannot yet express; the creation of words, signing included, regarding the common language; and ultimately teaching a child to use words as well as actions to explain feelings.

Your child’s expressions may appear to be more graphic for a number of reasons: a) when signing, she probably will have stronger facial and bodily expressions: b) when learning to identify and express new feelings, the child might “overdo” it, and c) the child may feel an urgency to get her point across, especially if it is important to him or her.

Once he or she feels more capable of communicating effectively, the latter two factors will recede. However, pronounced expressiveness is the norm in the deaf community as well as for the deaf person who is not an active community member.

What’s important is to create a supportive family environment in which feelings and their appropriate expression are unconditionally accepted.

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Check out these amazing tools designed to teach & promote quality, effective, integrated learning. Go to:

Self-esteem Elevation For Children Coaching Certification

Special Kids Learning Series CD:-Lets Go To

Toddler Talk: Techniques & Games – Proven Language Therapy Techniques

Creating Inclusive Learning Environment For Young Children: What To Do Monday Morning, 1st Edition

#HowDisabilitiesAffectChildren #SpeachAndLearningInTraining #HearingLossInAmerica #BabiesLearningSignLanguage

* Did you enjoyed this article? Please share it on your social media.

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AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE

When you buy something from this website, I may receive an affiliate commission.
These are my opinions and are not representative of the companies that create these products.
My reviews are based on my personal experience and research. I never recommend poor quality products, or create false reviews to make sales.
It is my intention to explain products so you can make an informed decisions on which ones suit your needs best.

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