Louise Fenton - New Orleans, Louisiana
Louise Fenton was born in New York and raised in Connecticut. After finishing school, she moved to New Orleans, LA to absorb the exotic culture. She spent many years there before returning to New York to continue her film and television career. Children’s education has been a long-time passion for Louise who has worked on projects for Nickelodeon, the Noggin Network and as a producer of the Emmy award-winning PBS show, Reading Rainbow.
That decade spent back up North allowed Louise to enjoy close relationships with her many nieces and nephews, during which time she acquired an especially passionate interest in observing and participating in the ways in which they learned and developed. Her experiences with and love for each of her sisters’ children played a major role in her playful approach to parenting and multifaceted educational philosophy. Louise became known to her nieces and nephews as the kooky aunt willing to join in their mischief and more likely to be found dining at the kids table (or occasionally hiding with them underneath it).
When it came time to raise her own family, she decided to move back to New Orleans and with good faith her husband agreed to give such a major lifestyle change a shot. There, they had a beautiful baby boy born in December of 2009. It was during her pregnancy that while exploring ways to most closely bond with infants, she came across the much-celebrated Youtube video of Laura Berg and her eleven-month-old daughter, Fireese, signing together. She had always enjoyed the company of toddlers with great fascination due to their newfound abilities to communicate. Clearly it is of great comfort to new speakers to finally have words to share their ideas, personalities and senses of humor. The ability to use language to better understand the feelings of her future son at an even earlier age through signing appealed to her a great deal; so she dedicated herself to the effort immediately.
Initially, Louise sought out baby ASL classes in her area; but couldn’t find an instructor. Determined to offer her future baby these skills to communicate, it was through online videos (such as those on mysmarthands.com) and DVDs that she learned the signs for words she felt would be useful to an infant: signs concerned with foods, basic needs and family. Louise began using the signs for milk and eating/food with her son consistently since his birth. At seven months, he made his first sign (food) and Louise was more proud than she had been at any other milestone. And of course, she sprinted to the kitchen to get some food for that boy!
Wanting to share the success of this method with others, she decided to contact Laura to learn how to bring her MySmartHands program to Louisiana. First though, she wanted a better understanding of ASL out of respect to the deaf community and to feel better qualified to educate others. She took basic courses online, began practicing with fluent friends and plans to continue her education in ASL beyond ASL 101 and the MySmartHands curriculum in the months and years to come.
Louise remains in New Orleans with her husband and son. She loves to garden and care for her hens, Lucy and Wilhelmina, and she blogs about her parenting discoveries (with a concentration on green parenting) at future-mom.com.
