The ASL Bee

Are you ready to hear about our new ASL learning initiative?

It's so easy to let yourself plateau in a language. Especially for the little kids, who don't feel the weight of an injunction from God Himself to learn ASL. Coming up with creative ways to keep us learning is what I do for fun :)

So right now, we're working on vocabulary. We found word lists for ASL 1-4 at www.lifeprint.com, complete with links to videos of the signs, and we put them in a spreadsheet. On Monday night, we're having an ASL Bee! Our first one was yesterday. We run it just like a spelling bee, only you have to sign the word instead of spelling it.

Yesterday pitted the younger kids (Sam, Martha and Jane) against each other, then the big kids (Lige, Ellis, Lillian and Marriner.) (Sorry, that was a bit of mom-snark.) The little kid bee was pretty fast, but I'd like to note that Jane didn't get out until the 4th round, correctly signing "me", "nice" and "yes" right before getting out. I didn't try to give her easy words, but we were using the ASL 1 word list for the littles. Sam and Martha did really well on nouns, but they got out on pronouns. That was a good thing for us to talk about, anyway. Martha eventually won for getting "you (plural)" after Sam had missed it. High five to smarty-pants four-year-old!

In the big kid category, we randomized the entire word list. Lige got out the first round on "rollerblade". Which I felt bad about, because when was the last time you used that in a sentence? Marriner and Lillian were the finalists, and Lillian might have won when Marriner signed "poor" instead of "pour", but Mom accidentally showed the right sign instead of letting Lillian have a chance. But she admitted that she didn't know the answer, anyway. Marriner finally won. High five to smarty-pants forty-year-old! :) (As of 2 weeks ago...)

And we'll see who takes home the trophy next week!

Sunday brought some more to the story of the Temple Recommend Renewal. After church, Marriner said, "Guess what, MY temple recommend expires this month, too!" Duh, don't know why we didn't figure that out earlier, we always go together to get ours renewed. So then he asked the big question: "Who interviews me?" In a ward, anyone in the bishopric can do a temple interview. In a branch, only the branch president. Who interviews the branch president? We indulged in a little guessing, then arrived at the practical solution: go read the handbook.

Interestingly, the handbook didn't have any answers. But my grandma told me that when they were called as mission president, Grandpa signed his own TR. And we found out, that's how it goes with the branch president - he signs his own recommend. So Marriner went up to his room and had a little interview with himself. A visit with the stake presidency for the second half of TR interview, and we're ready to go to the temple!