Way back when I was in high school I took sign language classes. But I ran into a problem, I had lots of head knowledge, but very little practical knowledge because it’s hard to find a place to practice sign language.
{I received a free copy of Once Upon a Sign from Dawn Sign Book and was compensated for my time, opinions are mine}
Enter Once Upon a Sign from Dawn Sign Books.
How does Once Upon a Sign help you learn sign language?
I’m glad you asked. It takes familiar stories, so you’re not trying to figure out the plot, and tells the entire story with sign language. Unlike many other sign language videos the entire DVD is signed with ASL (American Sign Language, and it is proper American Sign Language from what I can see, not any of the SEE stuff, if you took sign language you know those terms).
My kids have a little bit of prior experience with sign language, but they were picking up signs from the video fairly quickly, and the last few minutes directly teaches you 3-5 signs each DVD.
In my opinion the main benefit of Once Upon a Sign DVDs is reinforcing what you’ve already learned. After watching these videos my rather rusty sign language skills are coming back to me a lot faster, and I’m looking around their site for sign language instruction for me beyond these videos.
What’s my favorite thing about these sign language videos?
I love how they tell the stories, it amuses the heck out of me to see the different versions of classic fairy tales told with sign language. I’m not in love with their adaptation of Goldilocks, but Red Riding Hood cracked me up, as did Jack and the Beanstalk (trailer up above).
The signs are very clear and easy to follow, and the people acting are fluent in sign language and know the grammar, but aren’t signing so fast a beginner won’t be able to follow along (that’s where I always got into trouble signing with deaf people, they can sign faster than I can follow. I was also amused to see a few locations I recognized from my sign language classes in college
Where to get your own copy of Once Upon a Sign?
Then head on over to Dawn Sign Press, and buy any of the 4 titles in the Once Upon a Sign series so far, from checking out their Facebook page (and at the time of writing this they have one of Shakespeare’s sonnets in sign language, so cool) Stone Soup is the next title in the series.
This is great! We had one those baby vocabulary videos for the kids when they were tiny – that flashed words and pictures on the screen. A couple of them had a woman in the corner signing the words as well. D used to watch them all the time, and I didn’t realize until a friend, who had gone to a “baby sign” class, came over – that he was picking it up. The only problem was that the rest of us weren’t – so he was “speaking” but no-one was noticing. We even have some home movies with him signing – no-one responding – and him becoming visibly frustrated. Poor little guy. Maybe we should all to sign now, to make it up to him 🙂
Ha! That would be pretty awesome. These videos were pretty fun to watch.
In some schools they use ASL as a language. This would be a cool skill to have, especially if you want to communicate “secretly” with other people!
I had a friend in high school who did that from time to time.
Sadly my high school didn’t have ASL as a choice until I was out of high school.
These look great! We used sign language a ton with Emma, but then Johnny wasn’t interested and it dropped off. I would love to use this series to get my kids learning again!
I bet your kids would love this series!
Would you recommend these for beginners? I’m trying to find the best way to start teaching this to my kids. I have no background in it, but I would love to do ASL as a second language!
For absolute beginners maybe not, but once you have a few words down this would be great for someone trying to understand the grammar and see ASL in action.
These look brilliant. I would like to learn to sign as we have quite a large contingency of deaf people in our church and it would be great to be able to communicate more effectively with them.
I love sign language! If you have an interest, I would highly recommend it. When I was in college I went to a deaf church and loved the experience.
Now that we are back from vacation, I am trying to catch up on all the posts I missed. My son James and I were studying sign language for awhile and we had fun making up things to say to each other. This sounds like a wonderful thing to add to that. I think I will get some for him.
I just did the catch up this past weekend as well. There’s been some amazing posts written while I was out of town.
James would probably really enjoy them.