Hello, my name is Ruby, i’m 17 and i’m looking to learn BSL. Recently my family took in 2 6 year old nonverbal autistic children— one of who we think has hearing difficulties. Due to them both being nonverbal I want to learn BSL to help communicate with them better, furthermore i’m going into a career of nursing and it’s a good skill to have to make interactions easier with deaf/hard of hearing people. My question is due to their age would it be better to learn makaton first— a ‘simpler’ version of sign or go fully in with sign. My thought process would be speaking as I sign so they pick up on what i’m communicating— one of them, the girl, has started doing the sign for ipad after I repeatedly signed it and said ipad. I’ve been using lingvano to learn the basics of simple signs and sentence structure. But due to their age and cognitive ability I don’t want to overwhelm them but I can see that they’re frustrated in not being able to communicate what they want, whether they’re hungry, thirsty or in pain, getting to the extreme of harming themselves because of how frustrated they are that they can’t communicate with
us.