It's gone really quiet...

[Lorraine]

Hi Folks

Just putting a quick post here as there doesn't appear to have been
anything for a while. I'm a PhD student coming to the end of my 2nd
year, looking at how BS has an effect on language development & social
cognition. Unfortunately I won't be able to make the Gesture
conference in Berlin this year - but would be interested in keeping in
touch with other researchers in the field. I was at the University of
Stirling but transferred to Northumbria University when my Principal
Supervisor moved. Best wishes to everyone, Lorraine

[Sara Bingham]

Deaf Children "Sing" In New Children's DVD

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 22, 2010
Contact Information:
Sara Bingham
3 Arnold Crescent, Brooklin, ON L1M 1J1
Tel: 905-922-9052 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              905-922-9052      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Website: http://www.weehands.com

Brooklin, ON – Sara Bingham -- author of The Baby Signing Book and creator of the popular WeeHands baby sign language classes – announces the newest addition to the WeeHands family. The new "WeeHands At Home" DVD makes learning American Sign Language fun and easy for children of all ages and abilities.

This year WeeHands selected the D-PAN Productions team to create our new "WeeHands At Home" DVD. D-PAN, The Deaf Professional Arts Network, is a national nonprofit organization based in Detroit, Michigan, founded by Sean Forbes and Joel Martin. D-PAN creates music videos featuring deaf and hard-of-hearing performers.

"Five of the children on “WeeHands At Home” are Deaf and most of the behind camera crew were Deaf as well,” said Sara Bingham, creator of WeeHands. “One of the moms on set emailed me later to tell me she drove home crying because her son (a triplet) is the most profoundly deaf of his siblings and people usually feel sorry for him the most...and he just appeared in a children's music DVD!"

This first DVD, "WeeHands At Home", is an instructional video featuring six children teaching 33 signed words and performing 10 familiar songs in American Sign Language. Our songs are signed on screen in their entirety and are perfect for all children from 0-6 years of age.

“We want to teach parents to use fun and very functional signs and songs with their children to encourage interaction and language development. I want parents to narrate their children’s world in signs and speech.” Bingham explains and she has placed a sample video clip from the DVD to show this:

Time to Change your Diaper song (WeeHands)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5yEzkYByb8

Bingham’s goal is to get the "WeeHands At Home" DVD into the hands of educators, audiologists, and early intervention programs, as well as parents who want to jump-start their young child's language and ASL skills.

WeeHands and D-PAN are proud to be working together to create the "WeeHands At Home" DVD. Both D-PAN and WeeHands' share a belief that all children, both deaf and hearing, should be exposed to American Sign Language-because you're never too young to benefit from the power and beauty of ASL.

WeeHands was founded in Brooklin, Ontario in 2001. Sara Bingham is the founder of WeeHands and the author of The Baby Signing Book. WeeHands is the world's leading children's sign language and language development program for babies, toddlers and preschool children.

###

[Claire Vallotton]

Hi Lorraine (and all IISR colleagues),
Yes, we do seem to have gone a bit quiet for a while. I think that's
because a lot of us are working in "sub-groups" around specific
projects. By way of updating the group on some of our various
activities, here's what's happening:

Mechthild Keigelman (Germany), Chamarrita Farkas (Chile) and I will be
meeting this week at the World Association for Infant Mental Health
(being held in Leipzig) where Chamarrita and I will giving a workshop
on using Infant Sign as Intervention. The three of us will be
discussing the survey project that a larger sub-group of us (including
in addition, Kim Hughes Wilhelm in Macau China, Marielle Lechenal in
France, and Liz Kirk in the U.K.) will soon be launching on line.
Lorraine, if you are interested in being part of that project, and
have a way to recruit participants in Scotland, we would welcome your
participation. The survey has been created and put on line, and we are
just in the process of finalizing some translations to Spanish,
German, French, and Chinese before we launch it.

Several of us will soon be putting together a symposium on symbolic
gesture for the International Association for the Study of Child
Language Conference that will be in Montreal next summer. This was
something initiated by Elena Nicoladis, and she invited a number of
our IISR members to develop a symposium with her - including Laura
Namy, Makeba Wilbourn, and myself.

Chamarrita Farkas is leading an effort to begin a new project on
normative development of symbolic gestures in Chile and the U.S.; I
will join her on this as an international collaborator. She will soon
be applying for a grant, and I will apply for funding to conduct the
U.S. portion of this. We hope to be using methods similar to those
used by Jana Iverson and her Italian colleagues Volterra and Camioni.

Those are the updates on current and upcoming Infant Sign work. If
anyone has any updates or projects/presentations they'd like to
collaborate on, or just get advice on, please feel free to use the
listserve to do so!

~Claire

[Lorraine]

Hi Claire and ISSI colleagues

This is indeed really interesting! In fact I'm intending to put in a
student abstract to the IASCL myself so it would be good to correspond
about the symposium. I'm looking in detail at intersubjectivity &
symbolic development, comparing longitudinal groups receiving
different types of intervention, including BS. My NVivo coding of
video data and SPSS analyses are throwing up lots of interesting
stuff, so I would love to be involved if there is any possibility of
this. As I'm still doing my PhD atm, I'll run past my supers the
possiblity of sharing in this larger project.
BW
Lorraine