Blog

TinyTalk…

I’ve always been fascinated by sign language, I remember when I was younger, my parents had a book that had the Alphabet in British Sign Language, the siblings and I used to love learning it, However, in my adult life, regretfully, I haven’t got round to learning BSL, mostly due to time and cost but it’s definitely on my ‘list’,

After His Royal Highness was born, I came across TinyTalk baby classes, I was immediately intrigued. We went along to the taster class when he was around 8 weeks old, it was quite funny as he slept through most of the session but I instantly knew it was something I wanted to continue.                                                             For a number of reasons, mainly the dreaded baby blues, I didn’t fully commit to the classes until a term later when he was almost 6 months old, four months on, we are still loving them.

Yes, proudly showing off that ‘Duck’ was his first sign. πŸ™‚ πŸ¦†He’s currently perfecting ‘Eat’ and ‘Milk’.

The weekly class is fun and relaxed with a  focus on teaching us ways to communicate with baby before speech is formed. In the first half of each class we learn baby relevant British Sign Language signs such as Milk, Eat, Food, Mum, Dad, House, Animals etc  all taught using familiar nursery rhymes/songs, instruments, sensory activities and signed stories. 
Throughout classes, there is a lot of repetition of the signs which helps them stick, we also get a useful print-out at the end of each class to remind us what we’ve learnt. The second part of each class is know as ‘social time’ with toys for the babies to play with and a cup of tea or coffee, (squash in my case) and some biscuits for the grown-ups. It’s great to have a good old natter with. πŸ™‚

One of our themed classes. πŸ™‚

I even purchased the extra resources from the TinyTalk website, I haven’t used them as much as I would have liked to, but they are useful to have on a rainy day, so to speak. They include CDs, laminated card of signs etc.

I do wish that one day soon BSL was taught in schools, it would be highly beneficial.

I could go on about this so much more but I must stop, if you’d like further information on TinyTalk classes or to see if any are run near you, their website is;

 http://www.tinytalk.co.uk/ 

*All views are my own*

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *