Describing people and their clothes
The students will ask for and give descriptions of people and their clothes.
Review colour signs
Play Clip 8.1b: Colours and review the colour signs with your students. Reinforce their recall by using colour flashcards, with the students responding with the matching sign.
Play Scene P and ask the students how much they understand.
Seeing people communicating normally in NZSL in different situations is part of your students’ language learning experience. This experience will help them to develop strategies to make meaning across a range of contexts and to communicate more proficiently in NZSL.
Introduce vocabulary for clothes
Show Clip 15.1b, which covers the vocabulary for clothes.
Explain that the sign for HAT refers to a beanie. Play the clip many times so that the students can develop their signing skills using the presenters as their model. Hand out Worksheet 15.2 (Describing people and their clothes) for their reference.
Remind the students about the sensitivity to "visual noise" that Deaf people have, just as hearing people are sensitive to loud auditory noises. Brightly coloured and patterned clothing, as well as dangling jewellery or brightly coloured nail polish, can distract people’s eyes when they are conversing in NZSL. Ask your students whether they have experienced this sensitivity when exchanging information visually. What have they found particularly distracting?
Play "Guess who"
Divide the students into groups of five or six. Play "Guess who". They take turns to describe one of their group members, using this pattern: hair, eye colour, height, colour of top. The others guess who the person is by fingerspelling the person’s name or signing IX-she or IX-he. This task will develop the students’ reading skills as well as their signing skills. Remind them to avoid looking at the person they are describing so as not to give the game away!
To vary the task, one student could describe a person and the clothes they are wearing, and the other students could draw that person from the description. Then they check their understanding by showing their drawings to each other and the signer. Adding colours to the descriptions adds a further challenge.
Create a clothing poster
Have the students, in small groups, create a fashion poster on which they draw or make a collage of different colour and clothing combinations. Remind them to use illustrations that they can describe using the NZSL that they know. Then, using what they have illustrated on the poster, they make up a description that they present to the rest of the class.
