On last week’s post, I had people recommend for me to check my learning of the alphabet and numbers out of order. I wanted to do this by going on the website that Zachary Hirshmiller recommended: “SignSchool.”

What you first see on the SignSchool website

Once I had signed up, I didn’t find a function right away to check my learning of the alphabet and numbers out of order, but I did find a very user-friendly interface that allowed me to choose out of various basic skills to learn.

Once I signed up and logged in

I selected the “beginner” difficulty and went right ahead learning “The Basics.”

This website is a great tool. It started me off with a super fun introductory video that caught my attention and explained left and right-handed ASL and the importance of facial expressions before teaching me any signs.

Then we went through some basic signs:

“What,” “your,” and “name.”

“What is your name?”

Since I already know the alphabet, signing my name was easy.

Me signing the first letter of my name

The website has a feature that accesses your camera so you can see yourself practicing the letters. I don’t really know how I feel about this. Normally I wouldn’t give a website access to my webcam, but I decided to try it, since I’m already trying new things. There is a little info button that says that SignSchool does not have access to my webcam and it is solely for my practicing purposes, so I chose to trust that it’s not lying to me. However, when I tried to click the option to disable the webcam, just to see, it wouldn’t let me. Strange.

The next thing was to learn the alphabet through a sentence. “The quick fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Honestly, I find this approach much more fun (and more helpful) than just memorizing the alphabet in order. (I’m really liking this website so far.)

I used the sentence to check my knowledge of the alphabet out of order, and honestly, it was pretty good. I’m positively surprised at myself.

Here is a review of what I learned this week:

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any suggestions for what I should try next or questions in the comments!

Bernice