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With Baby Signing you can help your baby to communicate with you before speech. Through action songs and nursery rhymes a range of simple gestures derived from sign language can be taught.
In this fun and relaxed way you can learn how to help your baby understand you better and enable your baby to "talk" to you. This is known as ‘baby signing’. Babies naturally use gestures to communicate before their first words. Baby Signing encourages these natural gestures and shows you many more you can use with your baby. It's easy! And it’s fun!
What are the benefits of Baby Signing ?
Baby signing allows your baby to:
Communicate with you in a way that otherwise would not be possible.
Enjoy enhanced vocabulary and understanding.
Eliminate many of the frustrations of being pre-verbal.
Enjoy the self esteem and confidence of being readily understood.
Baby signing helps you to:
Draw your baby's attention to the key word of a sentence, sparking connections of understanding and recognition in your baby's developing brain at a very early stage.
Speak more slowly so your baby can focus on what you are saying.
Stimulate your baby's intellectual development.
Enrich your relationship with your baby.
Along with the obvious benefits of improved communication between parent and child, research is showing that using signs actually encourages the development of a baby's speech. Speech and language experts say that signing encourages babies’ speech, as long as parents always say the word as they sign it. In reasearch done in the US, children who signed as babies had more advanced language skills and spoke in sentances sooner than children who did not sign.
In addition, at three years of age baby signers were talking like children a full year ahead. At age eight the children who had used baby signs scored significantly higher on the IQ test than the non-signers. They concluded that using baby signing improves language and cognitive ability and that this did not end when babies started to talk.
What is baby signing?
As a part of normal development before speech is well established babies often use a combination of gestures and sounds in attempts to make themselves understood. For example babies may point, shake their heads for 'no' or wave 'bye-bye'. We recommend introducing some extra gestures at this time to help support and extend your baby's naturally developing communcation skills.
These extra gestures are known as baby signs and they enable your baby to 'talk' to you before speech.
How is Baby Signing taught?
Everyone knows nursery rhymes and action songs are great fun and musical activities help stimulate language development.
The best way to teach Baby Signing is to combine the benefits of both music and baby signing. Specially written or adapted songs to target signs relating to your baby's interests and daily routines are often used. For example songs about mealtimes and bedtimes, going to the park and things to capture your child's attention, like animals and vehicles.
Don't use too many signs within the songs, just enough to highlight the key words. This ensures all songs are easy to sign along with for the beginner.
Check out where to find out about signing classes in our What's on section
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