Because of my son’s cleft lip/palate, he has been receiving early intervention speech services since he was 5 months old. About that time, our speech language pathologist (SLP) recommended that we do baby sign language with him to reduce frustration in times of communicating. Of course, what we do with one, we do with the other, so my daughter was joining along this journey (whether she liked it or not).
It was a little bit easier to incorporate everyday words into sign once they started solids at 6 months. We worked on eat, milk, mom, and dad. Except I felt really intimidated with teaching sign, since I don’t know anything at all. I know that it is only 4 words, but for some reason I still felt silly. So I was pretty lax with it all, so it comes at no surprise that we didn’t see any output from either baby when it came to signing things.
Most of his early intervention goals for that time period involved feeding and milestones, such as crawling. He met those and in his 12-18 month time period our SLP made it very clear that we were going to hit speech HARD. So it was time to really bump up the signing.
I had read about “Baby Signing Time” on the Multiples and More! blog (linked at the right). I looked into it and thought it looked like a great way to not only teach the babies signs, but also make me more comfortable with it. So I put it on our wish list, and for Christmas we received the Baby Signing Time Full Collection.
Includes:
-4 Baby Signing Time DVDs
-4 Baby Signing Time CDs
-4 sets of Baby Signing Time Flash Cards
- Good Night Baby CD
I can’t rave about this series enough! Right after the craziness of the holidays and the Big First Birthday, I started watching Disc 1 with the kiddos. They were enthralled by it! The baby-friendly viewing is right around 25 minutes, and there are cute little songs and babies showing the sign of the word. Kate and Spencer are all about it!
I then gained more confidence to use the words outside of the video time, and I was so impressed with how quickly they caught on. I think I saw the first sign after 2 weeks of watching the video every day! And since then, it has just skyrocketed. I have now seen the signs for dog, cat, bird, duck, eat, drink, cereal, milk, more, all done, baby, fish, juice, cracker, please, airplane, and monkey! It’s not that I’m looking for Kate and Spencer to be completely fluent in signing, but once we learn new signs, we just keep using them! And this is just from Disc 1. I am so thrilled with the progress, and know that it has helped with verbal speech as well. I can see they understand that each thing has a name, and they know what name is attached to what sign. In fact, we were walking to the car yesterday and the neighbor’s dog started barking. We couldn’t see the dog, just hear him. Almost immediately, both babies started patting their leg (sign for “dog”) and trying to say “doggie!” It was thrilling!
If you are considering doing baby sign language, this is a fantastic resource. You definitely don’t need this stuff to teach your little ones signing. But it was incredibly helpful for someone like me, who knew nothing!!
Check out www.babysigningtime.com for more information!
[...] the book “Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk” as a guide. Jenny posted a few months ago about her success using the “Baby Signing Time” video [...]
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