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Daddy-Daughter reading time.
They are enjoying “Baby Signs for Bedtime” and Dad is demonstrating the sign for “love”.
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Infant Signing or Baby Signing is a way to
communicate with your baby before your baby can talk. By using
simple gestures that your baby associates with different words, your
baby can communicate with you.
There are many different types of infant
signing programs, but we reccommend Baby Signs®,
developed by Dr. Acredolo and Dr. Goodwyn, who did the original
research on using signs with babies.
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I became interested in infant signing when
reading a book about children’s brain development when I was
pregnant with my first baby. I purchased the Baby Signs book and was
very excited about doing signing with my baby. She didn’t
really show any interest in signing until she was around 13 months old
(this is on the late side, many babies show interest in signing at a
younger age). She was ill and signed to us that she needed a
drink. We took her queue and began to model more signs. Baby Signs® became a wonderful source of fun and
communication for us. Since she didn’t speak any words
until she was around 16 months old, we would have missed out on so much
of her cute personality! Not only did we enjoy infant signing, but she
did too. After she got a couple of signs under her belt, she
would use them to have “conversations” with us, just for
the pure joy of us being able to understand what she was
“saying”. She started speaking very well, very
quickly at around 20 months, but still continues to love her Baby Signs®
board books and modeling the signs for her baby sister. One of the
first things she did with her new little sister, was try to show her
how to do the Baby Sign® for cat.
Some of our baby's fun and helpful early signs were "dog",
"cat", "rainbow", "milk", "eat", "hold me", "hold me" and "water".
Such positive personal experiences with baby signing has been the
catalyst for researching and carrying supportive materials for teaching
other baby's another means of communication.
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