Show Me a Sign - and I'll Show You Mine (sign2me.com)

Member Name: Glasgow Girl

Product:	sign2me.com
Date:	13/07/01 (192 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Marvel or Menace ?, A New Way of Communicating, A Quieter Life

Disadvantages: Signs Can be Mis-Interpreted

http://www.sign2me.com

The roots of this Internet site lie in a time when Joseph Garcia visited a deaf friend and it changed his life.

Joseph Garcia is an early childhood development researcher who probably thought he knew most of the answers when it came to his particular line of work. Well trained in the ways children can and do develop, he was amazed to notice how well his friend’s ten month old baby was communicating - using signs.

Joseph Garcia was fascinated, and went on to made childhood signing the subject of his studies.
The outcome of his researches was the book “Sign with your Baby” which was published in America.
Sign with your Baby was different in that it was and is aimed at hearing parents and enabling them to communicate with their hearing babies.

Sign with your Baby enjoyed huge success in America and was published in the UK in March last year. Media interest in the book was as high in this country as it had been in the States, with the current affairs programme “Tonight with Trevor MacDonald” leading the way with a feature on the book and its author.

Maybe I’m out of touch with the ‘babies and children’ sector of the media, as I only heard about it on the radio, just this past week, so the media is still interested.

Supporting Joseph Garcia, author Kelly Berman has written a new book called “Thumbs Up”, which provides a simple to use guide to how to begin signing to or rather with your baby.

As she says in the book,
“communicating without speech can be a frustrating process for both parent and baby. Teaching her a simple set of hand gestures could open up a whole new world of communication.” Based around the traditional ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’ rhyme, it is a simple-to-follow system of sign language using hand movements along with the rhymes, with most being a natural extension of t
he everyday gestures we all use to communicate - such as waving and pointing.

Baby signing is not attached to either American or British Sign Language and parents can even choose to create their own signs or adapt those supplied by either Garcia or Berman.

The best time to start this signing process is around eight months according to Garcia or around nine to ten months, according to Berman.

Kelly Berman suggests you start with about five ‘beginner’ signs such as ‘hat’, ‘bird’, ‘flower’, ‘fish’ and ‘more’. The gestures suggested can be demonstrated in an obvious fashion, with the sign for ‘hat’ being patting the top of your head with your hand open and palm down or the sign for ‘bird’ is shown by flapping one or both arms out to the side.

“Use whatever works best for you and your child” recommends Kelly Berman, or if your baby responds to a particular word, you can build the signs you use around that.

The apparent advantage of signing for your baby are that there is an improvement in communication between you and your baby. This sets up a good foundation for your child’s self-expression and will stand them in good stead for the rest of her life.
Baby signing also empowers your child to tell you what is wrong instead of screaming, whining or crying., thereby leading to a calmer, more settled baby and a happier mother or father. (primary care-giver is just to ‘hard’ a term for me to use here)

Countering the rapid rise in the popularity of this ‘new’ form of communication are those who argue that baby signing could interfere with the development of their verbal communication. However, other experts are convinced of the benefits of this method and say that it has no such effect. They have found that signing children usually learn to speak earlier, and by the age of two t
hey will have learned, on average, fifty more words than non-signing babies.


What all this makes me wonder is,
“what do the mothers think?”.

If you have tried signing with your baby, I would like to hear about it. As I said, I only heard about this during this past week - but I’m sure I read about something similar some time back - maybe as long ago as the sixties? I don’t know what to make of it, as parenting days are long gone.

I found the news item extremely interesting and as a result I found this Internet site. What I read made me think and that made me think I should share my thoughts with you.

What dooyoo think?

Thank you for taking the time to read my opinion.
GG

Summary: