When Hailey was still an infant, I attended a weekly meeting sponsored by my hospital. Often, they invited guest speakers to come and chat with the new moms. One special speaker happened to be deaf. She gave us some signing resources online and now I really had something to think about, will I teach my baby to sign?
Well, I attempted. With our busy schedules, it proved to be a little more than difficult to keep up the routine. We did get a couple of signs to stick, one of them being "more". She uses that sign currently. I always had good intentions with my baby but just never made a huge effort.
The My Baby Can Talk series of videos were created by Kathleen Waidhofer and her company, Baby Hands Productions. When Kathleen's first child was still a baby, she struggled with the lack of communication resources on the market. She made it her priority to gather as much information as possible and make it available to all of us.
Hailey was instantly amused by these colorful DVDs. She pointed at things asking, "Whassat?" (More times than I care to mention) She also started mimicking the hand movements of the signing babies.
I'll admit, I thought to myself that we really didn't "need" to learn signing at this point, with her reaching the 20 month mark and talking up a storm. We started doing the signs together and she surprised me by using them out in public or around the house. I was pretty impressed. My thoughts then turned to the fact that when we add to our family in the future, it would be quite helpful to have a preschooler around helping to teach her little brother or sister how to sign. Children tend to copy other children. It's a fool-proof plan. :)
The My Baby Can Talk videos use American Sign Language (ASL) to delight baby's senses, as well as educate and entertain them. I found them comparable to the Baby Einstein series of videos , except that the signing videos are of much better quality.
Here are some pictures of Hailey signing along with the video with very little prompting from me. She watches the signing being performed and just copies what she sees (click to enlarge):
When you have a chance, please check out the My Baby Can Talk website. Kathleen and her crew have provided us with great tips on:
If you'd like to shop now for the videos, click HERE.
WIN IT!
We have TWO sets of My Baby Can Talk DVDs (First Signs & Sharing Signs) to give away to TWO lucky MTW readers!
To enter:
Please send an email to mumsthewurd@gmail.com with "Signing" as the subject and tell us if your baby/toddler/school-aged kiddo knows any sign language. Feel free to share which words he/she/they know!
Winners will be picked on Sunday, October 7th at 10PM CST.
GOOD LUCK!
***Watch for the newest edition to the My Baby Can Talk line of videos, "Exploring Signs" making its debut on October 15th. Also keep an eye out here at MTW for your chance to win a copy of it!
5 comments:
I love sign language, and it is becoming a desire to know!
My 5 year old knows how to say that she is a pretty girl. It's absolutely embarrassing. I have no idea where she learned it.
Very interesting! Hope to win!
I've taught little bits of sign language to each of my kiddos. I would love to have this for Ben and Noah!
this would be great to do w/ the grandkids
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