Put Your Hands in the Air and Shake Them Like you are Saying "Cloud"

I usually get asked about Mia's signing a couple of times a week - here and in the classes and groups we do and just random people who see her in the grocery store insisting that I give her a piece of French bread or my keys.  The strangest conversation by far was the woman who asked me if Mia was hearing impaired, and I said I didn't think so, she just wasn't much of a talker.  Then she told her son didn't talk until he was three, so I asked if they taught him any signs and she said no and looked at me like I was crazy.  I guess you had to be there to get how truly odd an experience it was, so I guess you will just have to trust me.  However, more often I just get people who want to know how many signs Mia uses and when we started and how we taught her.  So, for those of you who are curious, here we go.  Please keep in mind that I am certainly not an expert on this stuff and there are plenty of experts to consult if you so choose, this is just our experience.

Mia regularly uses around 40 signs, closer to 50 if you count the way she can "ask" me to sing certain songs by making the associated gestures.  (If you are really, really interested, finish reading this parenthetical, if not you can skip it.  At last count, Mia had signs for eat, more, water, dog, monkey, bear, help, clean up, share, all done, down, flower, cereal, bread, later, yellow, tree, bird, plane, car, duck, chicken, baby, star, please, thank you, type/computer, color, keys, chair, table, refrigerator, sleep, swing, shoes, socks, apple, milk and cloud, more or less.)  She also has around 20 spoken words, although I think the videos from last week proved that many of them need a bit of work.  The signs we teach her are standard American Sign Language, although sometimes simplified, and her versions have varying degrees of similarity to the actual signs.  For example, her sign for "baby" is dead on, she does half the sign for "dog" and "refrigerator," you have to be initiated to the Mia Club to understand "chair," "shoes," and "socks," and both "duck" and "chicken" are entirely her own inventions (and are identical except that "chicken" is accompanied by a whispered "bawk, bawk, bawk" that will make your ovaries pop right out of your body if you ever see it in person).

I got a book about teaching babies to sign either before Mia was born or shortly thereafter, but have to confess I never got around to actually reading it.  I chose it because the baby on the front was cute, but the author's 70's hairdo and mustache turned me off.  What?  I never claimed I wasn't all about the superficial.  I do use the book to look up signs I want to teach Mia, but it's really outlived it's usefulness at this point.  These days, when I need a new sign I just google it.  Something like "ASL peanut butter" usually does the trick.  We also have a Baby Einstein video called Baby Wordsworth, which includes signs and is how Mia learned to say "refrigerator."  I mean, close enough, you know?  A lot of people really like the "Signing Time" videos, and I can see why, but we watched half of two of them and they just annoyed me and bored Mia.

I originally started signing "milk" to Mia when she was about 6 months old, but I was really sleep deprived and still nursing roughly 53 hours a day and I dropped it after three or four half-hearted days.  I started again when she was right about a year old with "eat," "drink" and "more."  She picked up all three signs within a couple of days and assigned actual (and correct) meaning to them maybe a week into it.  I'm sure there are techniques and methods and such for teaching babies to sign and I'm sure there are people who have done lots of research and study and written highly-accessible books that you can purchase and absorb, but what worked for us was to make the sign every time we said the word.  So, if I was asking Mia if she wanted more to eat, I would sign both "more" and "eat."  And, um, yeah, that was it.

I started with the signs I thought would be most helpful to me, like telling me she was hungry or thirsty, then added signs for things she was interested in, like animals and the computer.  Recently we have taught her signs for her favorite foods, so she can tell me both that she is hungry and what she wants for dinner.  She combines signs and combines words and signs to make sentences of a sort, although if I'm being honest I guess I have to call them commands.  She can tell me she is all done eating and wants down (signs) so she can get a hat or a ball (spoken).  It isn't always that easy though, she recently spent a few weeks telling me to clean up the birdie.  I never did figure that one out and she eventually gave up on me.

So, um, not exactly a fascinating tale, and I have no idea whether it would be beneficial to sign with your kid, but it has worked out really well for us and has eliminated a lot of the frustration I had trying to figure out what Mia wanted and she had because Mama was too dumb to differentiate the meaning of the particular decibel of her screeching while gesticulating wildly at everything in the kitchen.  Not that I didn't find that adorable, because she is my pwecious wittle monkey dunkey, but, wait yeah, that was really annoying.  It's so much better this way.

Comments

[Guwi]

Beth, excellent idea to sign with Mia. Whether a child is hearing-impaired or not, signing is a great way to communicate with your child, and has been shown to have an excellent impact on later language skills. Some people think it hinders speaking capabilities, in fact, it boosts them.

It sounds like you just started so you could get a peek inside her head, but regardless of why, it's all good. We've done a small amount, and the kids go months without using signs (they're 3 and 6, and verbal...to a fault) but they still think it's cool. We mostly learned from my sister's family--her husband is deaf, and her children learned to sign as infants. It was amazing watching their pudgy little hands signing before they could crawl.

Sort of made me feel like a bonehead, b/c I know, like, the alphabet and about 20 signs, and there they were holding full-on convos w/ their Dad about Stephen Hawking's latest black hole theories while he was feeding them rice cereal.

Anyway. It's all good. :)

[Haley-O]

I never did signing with the monkey. But, I know people who did with their kids, and, like you, they found it really beneficial. It's such a good learning practice -- i.e., good for their little minds. I was just lazy, and the monkey just likes to do her own thing (well, now that she's older and has words, she's all over me all the time, but anyway....!)

[Mary D.]

Thanks for the info about Mia's signing. I've often wondered about it and I think that it so cool.

My daughter is 10 months and I've tried signing "more" to her so she could politely tell us when she wanted more cheerios instead of screaming her pretty little head off. She hasn't picked up on it yet.

Maybe I'll give it a try with a few more signs and see if she gets it one of these days... sure does seem useful and much less annoying than the screaming thing.

[ann adams]

If I hadn't bought the computer a couple of years ago, I would have been looking at you strangely too. (Not really, I'm far too polite but I would have been thinking it).

The things I learn by reading blogs!!

I think it's great as simple ideas often are.

[That Girl]

I am really bummed because I thought this would be especially great for Face. I didnt count on the fact that his is physically incapable on signing and his ability to use his hands is obviously going to lag far behind his speech (he is already combining words).
My hope is that I can get him fully verbal or with some signs by the next operation.
I think the whole sign thing is an awesome idea.

[Deb L]

LOL. We haven't done signing, because I was too sleep-deprived to deal with it. It was just easier to pick the kiddo up, and say, "can you show me? Point to it!" And they would point with command in the direction towards the item of desire. It's like playing "hot & cold", only with less speech. Every once in a while we still fall back on that. There is a part of me that wishes we'd done ASL though.

[Heather Innis]

Hi there,

I found your blog this morning and really enjoyed your account of signing with Mia. I have a son that was born deaf in August 2005 named Ethan. He signs too!

My husband was recently walking out of the bathroom without a shirt on and stopped to interact with Ethan. Ethan pointed to his nipple and signed "dad, milk". LOL!

-Heather

[Tina]

I think it is amazing what Mia is capable of! Your story is actually quite fascinating to hear how it all evolved. My daughter had no interest, and quite frankly, neither did I. (sigh) It was easier for me, I guess, because both my kids were early talkers, ie: 3-4 word sentences by a year and then they just took off. To think that if you all keep at it- Mia will be fluent in ASL and will be able to converse with hearing impaired kids she may meet in school. Terrific!

[Jaime]

We did almost the same exact thing with Haylee. I love the fact that she cans communicate to me what she wants despite the fact she is unable to verbalize it. We even started with the same three words! Now she has started saying the word as she signs it. It's amazing to watch them progress.

[Brad]

We started this with our daughter, but she ended up being an early talker and we didn't keep it up.

Our son is now 15 months and we're entering the "you don't know what I want" phase. We're pushing through with words, although we've always been animated in our descriptions. It's not just "all done.", it's "all done!" smiling, with hands in the air, twisting the hands. It's an added excitement, instead of a replacement.

Good luck with the speech. Flashcards are great and kids like them more than most people would expect.

[Laurie]

We had a baby-sitter who taught C some of the basics in sign language. Most were dropped as he started talking more and more, but he will still sign (& say) please and thank you, which I find completely adorable. The funny thing is, people see him sign thank you (sometimes he gets shy when he needs to say it so we sign it)and ask me all the time if he is deaf although they hear me talking to him usually saying, "C what do you say, right, thank you" and he makes the sign. Strange.

[Chatty cricket]

ha ha...ha ha ha ha ha!

I'm not laughing at the signing, I'm laughing at the "clean up the birdie." And the woman who shot you the strange look. I can only imagine how stuff went in that house with a kid who didn't talk until he was three and had no alternate mode of communication.

[heels]

Being an almost-fluent signer, I have tried and tried to sign with Cole from early on. He just won't use it. He knows signs and will react when I use them, but the only sign I can get him to use is milk, and that's only when he's feeling silly. He speaks so well and seems to want to develop only that. So I still use signs, but I've more-or-less given up on seeing them from him.

[Leah]

I'm glad you posted this. I have been signing "milk" for D. when I nurse her. I started at 2 months, then didn't for a while, and I was worried the 6 months was too late. Now I'm feeling fine about it! I just do milk right now, but I'll add a few more as we get better at it. She's pretty good at telling me when she wants to nurse - she just lunges towards my boob (covered or not).

[Laurie]

We taught Haleigh to sign "more" and "milk" around 8 months old and even just those two words helped a lot with communicating with her.

Today, at 2 years old, she still does the sign just out of habit when she says those words :o)

[carey]

i thought about doing signs with my little girl but didn't really know how to go about doing it. i guess i was also a little lazy- i mean that is what libraries and computers are for, duh. she started talking early though so i'm not being punished for my laziness this time around. i will keep this in mind if i ever have another little one though! thanks for sharing!

[Ainsley]

My son Wyatt is 2 1/2 and is still not a big talker. We taught him to sign early (before we knew he would be a late talker) and we are so glad we did.For the most part he can sign and say the word, but he prefers to sign.

He, too, has a lengthy list of "signs" that he has made up to communicate different animals, songs, and words. People often look at me confused sometimes when he is miming his way through a conversation, but I think it's adorable.

Speaking of adorable, Mia is soooo cute!

[Joanne]

Beth I think it's great that you started signing with Mia when you were frustrated that you weren't getting any words from her. That post seems like *yesterday*, by the way. I thought of it the other day when you posted her saying all those words. I just wanted to post and say that I don't think it's ever too late to sign with kids, whether they do it from the time they're tiny or start at one, I think it can really be beneficial. One thing that worked really well for us was that we went to a free demonstration/ class on signing at our local library. The woman there said that it was a good idea to use the sign "eat" before you sat down for the meal (or however you bring on the food) and then to only use "more" once they have some food. She said it would be less confusing this way and it really was. Also there's a great site with an online dictionary and video so you can see how to make the sign here: http://www.aslpro.com/cgi-bin/aslpro/aslpro

[Mrs. M]

I think baby signing is great. When I was a nanny I taught the kids basics (more, eat, please, yes, thank you, etc.) But we never quite made it to 50. Still, the parents were impressed!

[Matthew Miller]

Heh, we started with the mustached man's book as well, but stopped it for a different reason, which was that I find it really hard to learn signs from still pictures. I also can't learn origami from instructions and have to be shown, so maybe this is just me.

So, along those lines, there's a very nice animated online ASL dictionary using Flash at http://www.aslpro.com/cgi-bin/aslpro/aslpro

And, we really like the Signing Time videos, but, if the two you watched were some of the early ones, then that explains it, because it took them a while to get experienced enough with making them -- somewhere around the fourth or so. Better music, the woman signing is comfortable in front of the camera, more creative and interesting all around. (And the Baby Signing Time volumes, which were also made later, are good too.)

[Nichole]

I had intended to teach Piper to sign, but she thwarted me by starting to talk early. Kids!

[jodi]

we signed w/ Michael, but dropped it when he started talking. He still does more though. It was the first sign he learned and the one he is most consistent with.

I have a bunch of sign, say, and play materials from a class I took w/him. The class sucked but the materials were good. You are welcome to them if you want them.

[Stephanie]

Well, now I have to see a video of Mia doing the chicken sign. I require it!

[KT]

How fun!! When my daughter was a baby (she is now a giant college student doncha know) I got ahold of 'Teach Your Baby to Read' probably originally published in the 70s (talk about scary hair)... I actually made the flash cards and she actually DID learn to read at a very young age... She was WAY ahead in school for like 10 minutes till the other kids caught up!! Still, she has the original flash cards tucked safely away and plans to teach her kids to read using them... I never thought to teach her signs, but had my new best friend the internet been widely available back thdn I probably would have!! In any case, I think it's the attention and the teaching/learning at a young age that provides incredible benefits and fosters a lifetime love of learning...

[Lilymane]

Beth - thank you for sharing your experiences signing with Mia. I took ASL in college but never thought to sign to my babies - darn it. I hadn't heard of it at all until last year. Recently I had to take my youngest (8) to the audiologist and I saw a book about Signed English on her desk and asked her about ASL and signing with babies. She ragged on all of it! She said it delayed speech and was not a good idea unless you "had" to and then she said ASL was out of date and Signed English was taking its place. I ran right home and looked up the bigger stories on the internet (yay for info in the ether!) So much for "experts" who do nothing but be negative and push their own agenda. I read great reasons for signing with your baby and was sad again I'd missed out on it with my kids. (I guess there is always the chance with my grandbabies!) Thanks again for letting us share the fun with you and Mia. "Clean up the birdie" is great. Peace.