The Makaton Charity is appealing for support. We are continuing to develop our services and resources for those who rely to our language programme for communication, and those who support them.

We are busy adapting our service within the current uncertain climate and are trying to meet the Makaton community's needs during these challenging times.

Here are a few things that The Makaton Charity have released in response to the COVID-19 outbreak:

Free downloads

Weekly special offers on resources

Sharing wider resources from our Makaton Tutors

Special health and safety information around the COVID-19 outbreak

Development of an e-learning platform to allow online training to take place

Many people will be impacted by this pandemic and we are committed to doing our bit to help.

The Makaton Charity is asking you to help us by donating money to keep our vital services and resources up and running. The Makaton Charity does not receive any government or significant grant funding and like many in the sector who rely heavily on social enterprise funding the Charity has been heavily impacted by the new social distancing rules.

Your support really can make a world of difference to lives of those like 'Dotty' who rely on Makaton for communication with her family (Dotty picture featured above). Here is Dotty's story:

We've used Makaton with Dorothy since she was very little, literally a few weeks old.

We started just using basic everyday signs for milk, mummy, daddy, hello and bye bye, we weren't particularly strict about it but tried to remember to use them as much as possible. I remember her being quite young and making her first attempt at the sign for milk and looking delighted when a bottle was produced.

Her signing at the start was few and far between, but it made me determined to carry on as she was clearly understanding my communication.

When she was a few months old, our local charity was running a Makaton Beginners’ Workshop (modules 1-4) and I was interested in expanding my signing beyond the few that I had picked up from Mr Tumble, so I signed up.

The course was great and gave me the confidence to really go for it and start signing with Dotty - the whole family got involved too. This was something that I really pushed and encouraged as it was important to me that Dot had more than just me who she could communicate with.

Her first official sign, and one she still uses regularly today, was dog. She was playing with our pooch (Winston) and he moved away, she signed dog indicating she wanted him to come back and play again. It was amazing, proper meaningful communication, done unprompted.

She used it daily after that and quickly added more to her repertoire. She is now aged 2 (27 months) and has over 100 signs, including lots of animals, and is putting them together with speech to make short sentences.

Learning Makaton has not stopped or hindered her speech development at all. We've always used Makaton alongside speech, and she has copied that behaviour. Her speech is really coming through now with lots of words, plus it's really helped her understanding.

It's also stopped her getting frustrated by giving her a means to communicate while her speech is developing.

I feel Dotty has flourished using Makaton by giving her greater independence and autonomy to communicate her wishes effectively. For the family and I, Makaton has given us a way to enhance our relationships with Dotty – finding common ground to not only communicate on a practical level, but also to play, have fun and love our time together.