While we were still expecting Nolan we went to the maternity expo at the Women's hospital and met Julie, a baby signs instructor. I took interest and asked to be put on her email list, and a few weeks ago I received an email inviting us to her baby signs workshop at the hospital. We have several friends who have taught some signs to their children and I thought it would be a really neat thing to do. There is a lot of impressive research supporting teaching signs to babies and Nolan is at the perfect age to start so we thought we would give it a try. I really enjoyed the class and Nolan was so attentive. Julie has this bear that she uses in her classes to help teach the signs and Nolan was completely focused on her and the bear. We received a book and several DVDs to help us get started. We learned quite a few signs during the workshop that I think will be very helpful. I left the class excited to start with our first signs.
Julie suggested that we start with five signs and add more later (Nolan won't start signing for several months yet). We have chosen the signs for eat, drink, sleep, all done, and are trying to decide what the fifth one should be. So far Nolan thinks it's pretty funny when I use the sign for eat when I am feeding him dinner. We will share these signs with you so you can use them with Nolan as well (we will be sharing them with Angie at daycare too). We look forward to seeing how Nolan does with the signs and hopefully they will make communicating with him easier before he is actually able to use his vocal words! :)
I vote for More! That was one of the first ones Luke got really well, also one of the first that most of my friend's kids learned. I vote for it because Luke used it for everything, not just if he wanted to eat more of something, but if he wanted us to do something again, etc. Bath is also a fun one, but not quite as useful as more. Luke's first sign was lights at around 6 or 7 months(totally not useful), and then he didn't learn any more for a very long time. I think he just liked lights so much that as soon as I showed it to him and he realized that he could do it he started using it. One other one to consider would be milk. We used it for nursing and it was nice to have that one right away.
ReplyDeleteWe didn't have any set number to start with since we didn't take a class and were just using a book. I think our book said something about using them all the time just like we talk all the time, and using as many as we felt comfortable with, adding more as we learned them. Baby could pick them up as he was ready just like vocal language. They also sugested singing with signs but we never did that. Hope you guys have fun with it. I think it really made a huge difference with Luke and I would recomend it to everyone, especially parents of boys since they generally learn vocal language slower than girls.
that bunny is a tad creepy.....
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