One of the clients at the group home I am currently working at is unable to speak, but signs with some proficiency. Which is to say, we have been told that she knows a couple thousand signs. One of the challenges with communicating with her is that she does not make the signs any more correctly than the semi-verbal lady in the house speaks correctly. Which is to say, if you know what they are talking about, you might be able to figure out what word they are signing or saying.
To help foster communication, staff have been asked to learn 150+ signs that TPTB believe she uses most frequently. We are going to be tested. They are not going to test us in recognizing the signs as she makes them, enabling us to understand her. At this point I would like to emphasize the point that she hears within normal parameters, and understands when others speak to her. We are going to be required to demonstrate the signs that we have learned. We have been given photo-copies of pages from a book on signing. Those copies were made available to us last week, but were not terribly useful because we will not be needing to learn all the signs in these pages. The list of the signs that we will be tested on was made available to us yesterday. If I am not mistaken, we will be tested at the monthly staff meeting, which is going to be on the 23rd. This leaves us 10 days to learn 150+ signs.
A number of the diagrams in these copied pages look different from the video clips I found from the Michigan State University Communications Laboratory.