Brooke Leidholt

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...

Well, it's time to start another genius hour! For these next eight or so weeks Maci and I will be learning sign language. We chose to do this for our project because it is something that we thought would be both interesting and fun. We actually came across this idea while on a livestock judging trip when one of the younger members was showing us all the signs she knew. We thought it was pretty cool and it is something that could be very handy so we though we would give it a try. Our main goal for this genius hour is to learn enough sign language to communicate back and forth with each other. We are planning on learning small things, such as the alphabet, numbers, and animals, first. Then, we will work on putting it all together to form simple sentences. I have a feeling that our plan is not going to go exactly as planned just because we don't know how long it will take us to learn everything we want to. We may have to shuffle some things around or add topics but I think we wi...