On May 17, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Stefan Wöhrmann <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

long time ago I spent much time on creating teaching material for my SignWriting- lessons.
Today we simply start to read... some time later to use the dictionary in order to create documents.

Thank you, Stefan, for mentioning teaching through reading. I am happy to learn that you are teaching in this way…

This is how I started teaching both DanceWriting and SignWriting years ago - I didn't teach any symbols. I just gave everyone reading material, and we started to read, and through the experience of reading, it is amazing how well people learned to read…of course writing is always more detailed and harder in all languages, but reading should be easy if there is plenty of reading material…

That is why I am working on gathering reading materials for our SignWriting workshop July 1st-7th in La Jolla, California - The experience of sitting down and reading a newspaper or a novel or any thick document, written in a signed language, and written by someone else other than yourself, is a new experience for many people…even skilled signwriters. Most signwriters read their own documents, but rarely sit and read other people's documents… To think in ASL or any sign language, without thinking in any spoken language, and just read the language directly and silently, can be a mind-blowing experience -

So in the workshop, of course we will teach basic symbols, and also detailed symbols too…but we will also dedicate an hour or so, to just reading other people's SignWriting documents - and finding the meaning in them - and discussing what was hard to read and what was easy to read, and why…

Come to our workshop near the beach!

(it is not on the beach, but one block away from the beach in a nice room with refreshments ;-))

SignWriting Workshop, July 1-7, La Jolla, California