Monday, December 10, 2007

Small creatures talking

We had a great weekend. Boy news first: I was on record as being dubious about the whole infant sign language thing, but I am a believer now. The kid talks all the time.

He talk about what he wants: eat and drink have been consistant for a while now, but he's starting to get more specific and increasing his vocabulary. In the kitchen this weekend, we saw him ask for a banana for the first time. He's was pointing but we kept not understanding, so he just made the sign for banana and our jaws dropped. It's not one of those signs you can easily misinterpret either, you hold up your index finger and make a peeling motion with your other hand. He said it clear as day.

He also likes to talk about what he sees, which mostly means lots of animal signs. Anything large and quadrupedal gets the horse sign, but that's not bad. The difference between horse, cow, donkey, and moose signs are pretty finicky. He came to visit my high school class on Friday and impressed everyone by correctly identifying the animals we found with google image search.

And to think that without sign language I might have no idea how much goes on in his head! I might not have known he could tell a cat from a dog, much less a picture of a dog from a picture of a horse! Credit to his mom, again, on this one.

So here's me, psychology grad, certified teacher, didn't know anything at all until this kid came along.

Yesterday Peter went to visit my folks while Grey and I went to see the Golden Compass. It was great! I found it much more emotionally involving than the rest of the epic fantasy type movies (Narnia, Star Wars, Hobbits, etc.) and I thought that the seditious themes were portrayed fairly true to the books. Any more overt and it would have been caricature, there is so much less room for imagination and subtlety in movies.

I'm writing a lot this morning because my lesson is coming hard, but at least I am getting something done, right?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good work with the signing guys. We're just teaching him milk, more, bed and all gone for now to see how he gets on. How old was the little fella when he started signing back?

grey said...

I started signing to him at 6 months. They say before that they have virtually no memory. He started signing back somewhere between 9-10 months -- but I wasn't sure that he knew what he was doing. On his 10-month-birthday we had our real 2-way conversation (see my post Aug 07 about that)