How to Sign Common Animals in Sign Language

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Melissa and on behalf of Expert Village today we are going to be learning some basic signs, words, phrases in sign language. In this clip, let's learn some animals. What you'll notice with a lot of signs is that there are very literal to what you would normally do in daily life. For instance, a dog, if we jump to dog for a moment, a dog, what you'll want to do is take your hand, slap your side, and snap twice, dog; like you're calling a dog. Dog. Cat, if you were to pretend you are a cat with whiskers, you would do this. Your three fingers are open and you would take your index finger and your thumb and it's like you're pulling at your whiskers. So cat, we know dog. What about rabbit? Take your two fingers like you are forming ears, rabbit, rabbit. Fish, what do fish do? They swim, so you take your hand and motion it swimming, fish, fish. Butterfly, of course many people you see do this anyways, but butterfly, it looks like a butterfly. If you were to do say hand shadows on a wall, butterfly. Finally, bird, think of a bird's beak. So bird is like this, you take your index finger and your thumb like you were moving your beak and you hold it toward your nose then or at your nose. If you can think of another bird for instance, an owl. What do you think an owl will look like? Of course something like this, that's an owl as well."