Literacy and The Baby Signs® Program

A recent article published, Read All About It: Linking the Baby Signs® Program and Literacy Development

by Linda Acredolo, Ph.D. and Susan Goodwyn, Ph.D. Co-founders, Baby Signs, Inc. touched on a topic that people ask me about all the time. Will signing help or hurt babies literacy later? Read the following short passage for the short answer, or email me and I'd be happy to send you a copy of the whole article.

Knowing lots of words helps children comprehend what is read, guess at words that are difficult to decode, explain problems they are having, and understand explanations and instructions teachers provide.

And how does the Baby Signs® program help? Our NIH-supported research showed that infants exposed to signs during infancy had better receptive and expressivelanguage vocabularies by the time they were two and three years old. In fact, the infants who learned to use signs as infants had verbal IQ scores that remained high well into the elementary school years.

When it rains it pours!!

All of a sudden at 13 months my daughter is using a few more signs! It's like something clicked and it all fell into place! She has added EAT, MORE, HAT, and SLEEP to her vocabulary in just the last week or so. I have been showing her the "My Fun Signs" video made by Baby Signs and she began copying the kids in the video. Soon after that, she began applying the signs to our daily life! Just tonight at dinner she signed SLEEP when she was finished eating. Paired with some yawning and eye rubs it was her way of telling me she was really tired and ready for her tubby and to get to bed. It was so nice to know how she was feeling, I felt very connected to her, it was amazing! I love a good chat over dinner.