Over the past 15 months, with social distancing restrictions, face masks, limited contact with family and friends and increased use of video calls/facetime, baby signing can help when communicating with youngsters in public. It has increased in popularity in recent years as a way of learning to communicate with children before they can talk.
Dr Joseph Garcia, a child development expert inspired the idea of teaching babies a range of signs. Understanding language and ability to make gestures develops much faster than a child’s ability to speak. He found that hearing babies of deaf parents easily copied their parents’ signs and used them to communicate, and explored the benefits of hearing parents to hearing children using signing too.
Baby singing is about enhancing communication and language skills not to hinder them or replacing language and it may actually help a child learn to talk and add a fuller range of words to their vocabulary and using signs along with speech enables a child to make the connection between the gesture and the word.
You can use British Sign Language as a foundation for your baby signing, but you can also make up your own gestures that mimics the meaning of the word.
Here’s some baby sign examples;
Do you use Baby Signing in your setting?
Do your Parents use Baby Signing? Encourage parents to contribute any home observations to build a holistic view of a child’s early years.
With the multi media function on eylog you can add multiple media to a single observation, enabling you to truly capture the story of a child’s development and link it to relevant statements within your chosen assessment framework.
Share your baby signing online with us or book a demo online at www.eyworks.co.uk.
