Video from a BSL user

I love when I stumble upon videos concerning Cued Speech.  I found this video on YouTube. I’m glad it was captioned.  The person in the video is a BSL user who used Cued Speech until she was 7 years old and then switched to signing.  Now, as an adult, she wishes she had continued to use Cued Speech together with signing, and is going back to school to relearn it.  I find her openness and willingness to learn Cued Speech to be refreshing.  I so often see negative posts from those who’ve never learned Cued Speech. 

I wish I knew more about this lady’s background.  I wonder why she switched at age 7. I wonder if her family, or school, or someone else was the primary influence for the change.  I wonder how she will do learning as an adult.  I hope I find more videos from her.

Just in case you can’t see the video, here’s a direct link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSs4PTV8UPs

Cues on Tap – Fairfax

The next Cues on Tap – Fairfax will be held on Saturday, January 9th 2010 from 7pm to 9 pm. The location is Auld Shebeen, 3971 Chain Bridge Road, Fairfax, VA.  To keep updated on future Cues on Tap – Fairfax events, join the Cues on Tap – Fairfax group on Facebook.

Vote for NCSA with Chase Community Giving

Chase wants to give away $5 million.  Simply vote for your favorite nonprofit (hint – National Cued Speech Association) through Chase Giving on Facebook and then ask your friends to do the same.  The voting ends soon, December 11th, so don’t wait!  http://bit.ly/dimpO

Practice, Practice, Practice

I guess this post is really aimed at those hearing individuals who are learning to cue, or who’ve learned to cue, in order to support someone who is either hearing impaired or using cued speech for other educational reasons. I want to talk about finding creative ways to practice and improve your cueing skills. I can relate some of the ideas which have worked for me, but I’d be interested to learn what has worked for others as well. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, when I started learning to cue I had to begin to think of the sounds I made when I spoke, as opposed to the actual letters. For me, this took a lot of practice. I’d completed the beginning class and understood how the mechanics worked, but I knew I needed to get faster and more fluent. Some people like to work from rhyming books such as Dr. Seuss books. I needed to get more comfortable cueing single words before I advanced to the point of cueing sentences. In order to help me remember the hand shape and position necessary to form a specific consonant vowel combination, I needed repetition of single words. I found that driving, while alone in the car, a good place for me to practice. I would prefer to practice alone so others didn’t see my mistakes. I would find a street sign and figure out how to cue that short group of sounds. I kept a Cue Chart stuffed down beside my seat for the times I needed reminders, but I would try to practice without it. "STOP" was one of the first street signs I tackled. Speed limit signs helped me to begin cueing numbers. I felt I’d really accomplished something when I successfully cued "Fairfax County Parkway". I know that the idea of cueing while driving sounds rather dangerous, but we have a lot of stop lights around here and I could use all that wait time to concentrate on a different sound combination.

As I progressed to the point of sentences and phrases, I started to think about what things I would say frequently during the day, especially things I would say to my son. I began practicing phrases like, "Time to go", "Are you ready?", "Where’s your backpack?", "All done?"… When I found myself repeating phrases during the day I’d add them to the list.

Eventually speed became my goal. My accuracy had improved greatly, but I was too intimidated to cue to anyone older than my son for fear of being judged. So, I began cueing to music. I’d walk for exercise and wear my ear buds while listening to music. Familiar songs with words I already knew were best. Often to get one sentence right, I’d miss the next three, but that was ok because I’d gotten one right. I was making progress and that was the important thing.

Cue Camp VA is all a Twitter

Are you on Twitter?  Cue Camp Virginia is.  You can become a follower at http://twitter.com/CCVA.  CCVA hopes to be posting updates to Twitter through out the camp weekend of August 27th to August 30th.  So, if you can’t come to camp, you can still follow along with what is happening on Twitter!

You Cue!

Today was a first for me.  While at the mall with my son, a lady walked up to me and said “You Cue!”.  Indeed as my son and I wandered through the mall talking, I had been cueing to him.  She was from neighboring Montgomery County, but we knew some of the same people.  I was so surprised though to have someone actually come up and know what it was I was doing, that I was somewhat flabbergasted.  I don’t even remember if I told her my name!  I know my son told her his name and we talked about where he goes to school.  I just thought it was so neat that someone stopped me in the middle of a mall to say “hello” because they saw me cue. 

Have any of you ever met someone because they saw you cue?

Cued Speech at NOVA Community College

This fall the Northern Virginia Community College will offer “Cued American English: Level 1″ for the first time.  The class will begin on August 24th and will meet on Mondays and Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:20 pm. It will be worth 2 credits.  You will find the class in the course catalog under Interpreter Education.  You can see more information on the class here.  The class instructor will be Suhad Keblawi.

Cue Camp Virginia

Registration for Cue Camp Virginia 2009 is now open!  Visit http://www.nvcsa.org/blog/2009/06/01/ccva-registration-is-now-open/ to learn more.  Don’t forget that there’s a new date and a new location for 2009. 

Dates: 8/27/09 – 8/30/09

Location: Front Royal, Virginia

Research has shown that the family provides the most influential language model in the child’s early life. Cueing in the home has been proven to provide a deaf child with the greatest understanding of language. This is the key to an ability to read, write, communicate and reach his or her full potential. At CCVA, families and professionals can learn the entire system of Cued English in one weekend, without the distractions of everyday life. See first hand the successes of families and professionals who have been using Cued Speech for many years. Learn how Cued Speech can help to meet your child’s academic needs. Receive educational and emotional support. If you don’t want to take the class, come to the presentations by professionals in the field of deafness and deaf education. Hear the latest research and learn to advocate for your child.

Learning Language

“Imagine, if you will, a family that has just had a new baby. These new parents never talk to the baby and somehow manage to keep the baby from most conversation until he is about two years old. At two, they decide it is the correct time for baby to begin to talk. Each day, for fifteen minutes, they have talking lessons. They don’t speak to the baby the rest of the time. These well meaning parents spend a lot of money and research and find the perfect talking curriculum. Unfortunately, they quickly become frustrated with their child’s inability to speak.”

“Now If these parents came to you for advice I’m sure you would be horrified that they hadn’t been speaking to their baby all along. It is likely you would tell them to dump the complex ‘talking curriculum’ and just start conversing with their child. You would reassure them that teaching him to talk is really not that complicated and if they would just start to make conversation a regular part of his environment, he would absorb (learn), most of the necessary skills.” http://kbagdanov.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/819/

The quoted paragraphs above were not written about raising a hearing impaired child.  The title of the article is “3 Keys to Great Writing” and it was found on a blog called Substantive Education.  The focus of the blog is a home school education.  The writer goes on to draw parallels between how children learn to speak and how they learn to write.  Now don’t get all upset with the author for putting an emphasis on speaking, she does have hearing children.  However, when I read these opening paragraphs I was struck with the similarities to what happens in many hearing households who suddenly find themselves with a hearing impaired child. While the Substantive Education blog article focuses on learning to speak, the physical act of speaking the words is merely a way for the hearing author to assess her hearing child’s ability to learn language. So understand my point, look back at what was said, not in the context of learning to speak, but in the context of learning language. 

For years many families didn’t even know that their child had a hearing problem during these early years because there were no screening tests.  Unbeknownst to the parents, they did manage to “keep the baby from most conversation”.  But, even in today’s environment of early screening, parents find it difficult to provide a first language model in the home. How does one just start conversing with their hearing impaired child?  To speak their native language while cueing is often not even provided to the family as an option by the professionals they encounter.  But cueing in your household allows the family to continue to converse in the language of the home, while including the child in the conversation.  It allows the family to “just start conversing with their child”.  It makes “conversation a regular part of his environment, (and) he (will) absorb most of the necessary skills.” 

If you listen to the Scher/Consacro family in the video below you will see how they have cued to their children from the day they were born. You can witness for yourself that immersing your child in the language of your home through Cued Speech does indeed make “conversation a regular part of his environment”.  Ultimately, it becomes apparent that a hearing impaired child in a cueing home can indeed “absorb most of the necessary (language) skills” in much the same way a hearing child would.

Who Uses Cued Speech? from National Cued Speech Association on Vimeo.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Can He Cue?

The answer is YES if it’s at the Adventure Theatre in Glen Echo, Maryland.  Adventure Theatre will have a Cued Speech performance of If You Give A Mouse a Cookie, on Thursday, April 9th at 1:30pm.  Adventure Theatre is willing to do more Cued performances if they see that there is a demand.  Currently, they provide one ASL Interpreted performance per show.  I believe this will be their first Cued Speech performance.  For more information and ticket prices visit their website.  Bring your own cookies!