Human beings communicate with words, gestures and facial expressions. Rather than inventing your own family signs, it makes more sense to learn and teach a sign system which can be used with others.

 

BSL is used by 70,000 deaf people in the UK every day – along with hundreds of thousands of family members, friends, professionals working with the deaf community and students of sign language.

 

Basic BSL is easy to learn, and you only need to know a few signs to be able to share a story with your deaf child. And if you don’t know the sign for a word, try drawing a picture, writing it down, fingerspellling it or acting it out!

 

Many world sign languages are similar to British Sign Language, including Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and New Zealand Sign Language.

 

Thanks for letting me know about Signed Stories. I am currently putting together our first e-newsletter for families and will include the information there. It looks like a great initiative. Families over here are starved for this kind of resource and with so many similarities between BSL and Auslan, I hope they will find it useful. Ann Porter, Aussie Deaf Kids

 

Thank you for doing this Signed Stories website! As a deaf mom to two deaf/hh children, I believe your work is valuable for the deaf & hard of hearing children in U.S. My daughter, Catalene and I had a ball all morning learning British Sign Language through watching your stories in BSL. Terrylene Sacchetti