Big Announcement!!!

Check out the side bar to the right! Yes, our local group, the Down Syndrome Family Network of the Fox Cities, is proud to announce that our special guest for our 1st Annual Fox Cities Down Syndrome Awareness Walk will be Rachel Coleman!!! Rachel will be performing Signing Time Live at our walk!!!

Rachel Coleman is the co-creator and host of the children's DVD and public television series Signing Time! Rachel’s oldest daughter Leah was born profoundly deaf. After learning American Sign Language (ASL), Rachel wanted to create a way for all children to learn to communicate with her daughter.

Rarely do we see individuals who believe in the power of one to change the world. Idealistic as it may seem, Rachel Coleman is just such a person. Signing Time! was developed based on her personal experiences. Rachel learned from her two daughters the power of ASL. Leah, who is deaf, showed her mother how much easier it was to have a baby that signed and could tell her what she needed. Rachel was especially excited to see how knowing ASL accelerated Leah’s spelling and vocabulary skills as she grew up. Her daughter Lucy, who was born with spina bifida and cerebral palsy, was never expected to communicate in any fashion. But by growing up in a home where ASL was the primary language, she learned to sign, found that ASL was a powerful means of physical therapy and eventually learned to speak the words she’d grown up signing. As a result, Rachel committed to share what her daughters had taught her with the world. This was the motivation behind Signing Time.

Signing Time teaches the basics of ASL to children of ALL abilities a fun and engaging way. Since the release of their first video in 2002, Signing Time has spread to customers in all fifty states and twenty different countries almost entirely by word of mouth. Parents and professionals everywhere praise the Signing Time series for opening up a world of possibilities for their children, whether they are using ASL as a means to communicate with their babies before they develop speech, or learning a second language, or even for children with special needs for whom speech is a challenge.

Signing Time's mission is to create programs and opportunities designed to dissolve the barriers that exist for children (or anyone) with disabilities.