Baby Sign Language Flash Cards - Illustrated ASL Learning Cards for Infants & Toddlers | Teach Early Communication at Home, Daycare & Playtime

Product Description

Why Sign? Signing is one of the most interesting, fun, exciting, and useful things you can do as a parent. This book will not only show you the steps needed to make signing successful in your home, but it also features 200 signs as well as helpful tips for teaching them and incorporating them into your daily life. Read more Tips for Signing with Older Kids If you want to continue signing with your growing children, here are a few tips I’ve picked up along the way. Recognize that it’s normal to drop signs. If your child stops using a sign, don’t get upset. Keep signing yourself. If your child sees that you aren’t signing, they aren’t motivated to keep signing, too. When you continue to use signs that you already know, they will see that it’s a normal way of communication for your family. Learn new signs. Absolutely keep using the same signs that you have been using, but you will also need to continue learning new signs. As you realized when your child began signing, it’s easy for both you and your child to learn new signs. That doesn’t have to stop, and it shouldn’t. Consider taking a class. If you’re truly interested in learning the entirely of American Sign Language and hope your child can use it as a second language, you might want to take a class. Using ASL signs with your baby is a good first step, but ASL grammar is quite different from spoken English. A class will help you learn, and then master, ASL as a whole. Interact with your local deaf community. You likely have a wealth of resources available to you in your own community that you may have not been aware existed. Interacting with deaf folks can really improve not only your vocabulary and grammar, but it can be an amazing opportunity for your child to meet other children who use sign language. How long will it be before my baby starts signing? It really varies from one child to the next, just as everything else does. I started signing with Corbin at eleven months and Lauren and Willow at six months, and they both took about four weeks to sign back to me. It can take as little as a week for an older child to months for a younger one (generally, although not in all cases, the older a child is the quicker she will be to sign back to you). Read more How will you know if a baby wants to learn a new sign? At first, signing will be new to you and your baby, and it will be extremely exciting once he learns his first few signs. Once he realizes how wonderful signing is and how it can not only get his needs met but also his wants attended to he may request new signs from you. It may not seem apparent at first to you but my children would point to an object and they would get that “look” in their eyes, which meant, “What’s the sign for this, Mom?” If we were planning an outing I would look up a few new themed signs in advance, which is why I wanted to categorize this book by subject matter. So if you’re going to the zoo, be sure to stock up on animal signs! Read more