Brooke Leidholt

This week was pretty productive for Maci and I. We teamed up with Brianna again, which is working pretty well for us. We are able to compare what all three of us know. This is especially helpful for when we forget words. With  three of us, one person usually remembers the word the other two forgot. We found a really good website last week, and we continued to use it this week. It has learning signs broken down into lessons, which is super handy because they have enough words you can make different sentences. We are all three getting much better at stringing words together, and understanding what others are saying. However, we are a long ways from fluent. We are realizing there are a ton of words and it is going to be way to much to remember in eight weeks. With that being said, Maci and I decided we would sign a song for our genius hour. We haven't decided which song yet, but we will soon. The next two weeks we will dedicate to learning the signs for the song and practicing.

I don't know about anyone else, but it seems like everything is super busy this time of year. With that being said Maci and I chose to refresh our sign language skills this week. We reviewed most of what we have learned thus far. I found this to be much need because I'm having a hard time keeping all of the signs straight. This week we collaborated with Brianna and what she has learned. We found that we were signing some things differently, but it mostly was just the difference in sources. The three of us also came to  the conclusion that when signing you don't need most of the little words like "to" and "is". This made life a little difficult because we haven't figured out when they are used or not. We have defaulted to leaving them out most of the time. I'll clarify about the shortening of phrases a little. In English we would normally say "my name is Brooke". However, when signing you sign my, name, and then spell out your name. ...

Well to be quite frank, Maci and I did not get to accomplish as much as we had hoped. This week has been super chaotic for us both and unfortunately sign language was drown out by homework. We managed to work in class today to figure out so greetings. We learned things like hello, goodbye, my name is Brooke, and what are you doing. One thing I thought was pretty interesting is how there are multiple ways to sign the same thing. For instance, when you sign a double letter when you spell out a word (like the two "o"s in Brooke) there are two ways. You can make the sign two times, or you can make the sign and slide it horizontally away from you. Another thing Maci and I encountered was different ways to say a phrase. Brianna was showing us how she learned to say "hello, my name is"  but it was a little different than what we had been doing. The video we watched did not incorporate the "is" into the phrase, but hers did. We will now be looking into which ver...

This week has been fairly hectic, and I didn't get to practice as much as I would have liked to. Maci and I did get to spend some time together learning adjectives though. We picked up colors, and other adjectives like short, tall, beautiful, expensive, old, young, etc. We are beginning to pick it up faster, but remembering everything we have learned up to this point is a little difficult. Because there are only so many hand signals you can make, a lot of the signs are very similar. I am having a little difficulty remembering the movements, and am a little worried I am all wrong. An example of similar signs are cute and sweet. The only difference is that one has a longer motion. When we start using sentences I am very worried Maci and I will say something totally wrong. Next week Maci and I want to continue on with this topic. So far, we have been learning the individual sections in sign language. I think it may be helpful to learn how to put a sentence together. It may also be...

Well, another week of Genius Hour has come and gone. This week Maci and I decided to learn animals. We found a couple really great videos that were easy to follow. We ended up learning the signs for about 20 different animals. One of the things I found very cool was that the signs usually corresponded with something the animal does, or a trait they exhibit. One example of this is the sign for monkey is scratching your sides. The sign for monkey. One of the biggest challenges I have found is finding quality sources. Sometimes it is very hard to decipher images if you just Google something. The arrows showing movement are pretty confusing on a lot of them. We mostly stick to videos because they seem to be easier to follow, and we are usually able to learn a whole group of similar things all at once, which is very helpful. Next week we will most likely be learning adjectives. I'm pretty excited to keep going and learn more because right now Maci and I can't really conv...

Well, Maci and I have had a successful week of learning sign language! Originally we planned to learn the alphabet this week. However, we found that was fairly easy as we both already knew some of it. We decided to move on to numbers ahead of schedule, so we have already messed up our planner. Oh well, at least we are ahead of schedule and not behind! The alphabet did not pose much trouble and was pretty easy for both of us. However, the numbers were a different story. We found a great video that showed us 1-30 so that is what we decided to learn. We found that they were much different than we anticipated, and some were very similar. I did not realize the direction of your hand mattered so much. For some of the numbers the back of your hand faces you and for others it faces away. The hardest thing I found was remembering which numbers were which way. Another thing I didn't realize is that signing will make your hand tired. The numbers mostly use your fingers, so by the time we we...