Makaton progression

After much thought that my Makaton sign language mastery left much to be desired, I ploughed on.

Kevin and I had mental blocks with learning it but kept trying! And now, with Coraline at just over two and half years old this past week has been really exciting and kind of stunning to us!

To our delight, in the past couple of days Coraline has seen a teddy bear and a real bear in books and done the sign for teddy. The amazing thing about that is I haven’t signed teddy in a while (as I forgot the sign...) so that must have imprinted a while ago!

She was looking at a book and signed “flower”. Unprompted! She has a grasp of the sign for the colour “red”. Yesterday I was signing “jump” in a book we were reading and she took the same book herself this morning and did the sign for jumping herself. There’s a cushion with a printed photo of me and others on it in our room. She picks it up and signs “mum” when she sees it. And so on! Each new emergence or approximation of a sign is just a delight for us.

I felt really excited about Coraline getting up today. Excited to see what she would do with her Makaton sign language today!

This level of interaction feels so intriguing and fascinating to see! This current time in the world really is a moment to notice and celebrate small things. But as I always say, these things don’t feel small to us, they feel amazing!

Kevin’s Makaton joke yesterday:
Me: “I learned the signs for tortoise and turtle today as they’re in Coraline’s books. They’re different. I’ll teach you”
Kevin: “You’ll have to show me slowly”
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We’ll be enjoying weekend apperitifs even more to toast this! #makaton #makatonsigning #persistence