- Help for using gestures

HELPING you to produce your first poem with signs

You can produce a poem with your students following these 5 steps:

1- Choose a poem in your student´s language (it can also be created by the students themselves).

Select a fragment of it (from 4 to 10 lines).

Make a translation of this fragment to English (not a literary one, try only that the main ideas are present also in the translation).

2-After selecting a piece of poetry, it is prepared as follows:

-Increasing the size of the text until the longest line spans the width of the paper.

-Inserting an additional line of text above each line of the poem.

-Looking for two or three main ideas in each line.

-Placing the sign of each idea above it. If it is not in the dictionary, look for a synonym, or make an analogy (since the objective is to illustrate the poem, not to translate it).

Take for example the word "Peace"

If we go to the on-line dictionary, in the letter "P" , we´ll find that this word corresponds to the number 1362.

If we select in the yellow column on the right the numbers 1300-1399, this opens a window where we can see that the symbol is as follows

We can copy and paste it in the document, adapting the size, as was done here.

If you click on that sign, another window opens, showing us how to make the gesture in an animation:

It is important to relate the way to make the gesture from its sign. These illustrated explanations can also help you.

The processes of selecting the ideas of a text, looking up for words in a dictionary, proposing synonyms or making analogies, as well as interpreting the signs to recognize the gestures, are highly instructive, so it is advisable that the students do it by themselves.

The following video tutorial (and also these explanations in text) indicates you how signs can be placed on the text in the form of writing characters. In this case, you can easily resize them (like any other character), but you should before download and install on your computer the YoGoTe fonts.

4-With these materials, your students should be able to present the poem (only in the original language, not in English) making the international gestures at the same time.

Make a video recording your students (don´t forget to obtain their parents´ written permissions).

Upload this video to Youtube or any similar video streaming website.

5- Send us the link to the video in an email, with a copy of your school´s principal/director certification for the parental permissions.

If you want to produce more than this poem, we can also give you some advices for it.

You will be able at the end to prepare by yourself any text for your students with international signs!

The activity coordination

PS: If after reading these explanations you are still confused about how you should make your first poem with signs for your students, you can send a message to

yogote.coordinator @ gmail.com

explaining the kind of trouble or problem you find.

We will try to help you to surpass this difficulty, and in extreme cases, we could send you back the text of the poem with signs as well as a video showing your students how to make the gestures for their first poem with international signs.