teach my baby sign language

My daughter is now 22 months and she knows signs but doesn’t necessarily use them consistently. Usually she will only use them when prompted. She knows: more, milk, water, eat, all done. She still gets really frustrated by not being to express herself. I’m trying to transition her into using more of her words, because she still doesn’t use many words (she says hi, bye, all done, eyes, me). She sees a speech therapist to work on her speech. I’m planning on just reinforcing the signs she already knows and continue to work on her verbal speech.

The twins whom portrayed Little Jack in the movie “Meet the Fockers” learned sign language from watching Signing Time! videos. altough the videos are nice, I rather teach her sign language by myself and refrain from sitting a 6 month old baby in front of a TV screen.

Use these signs to sign Twinkle Twinkle Little Star:

Twinkle Twinkle
Little
Star
Wonder
You
Up
World
Diamond
Sky

Hungry and Thirsty

I thought fox was interesting.

Potato

And a few just for me:
Pepsi and Obama

On the lookout for nectarine, peas and yummy!

I want to be able to sign all the animals in a few of BB’s favorite books. Right now I am working on Time For Bed and these are the signs I didn’t already know:

Goose

Cow

Bee

Snake

Deer

Girl and Boy

#4 Hello and Goodbye
I’m going to count waving hello and goodbye as a sign because it’s so darn cute when she waves hello. She also waves good night.

#5 Frog!!
So funny! The other day she was doing this thing with her mouth and I thought, “Is she making the sign for frog?” Last night it was confirmed. She knows it so well she does it on command. I asked her to show Daddy the sign for FROG and she did exactly that. I was astonished. I thought she might need to see a picture of a frog, but no! Instead of sticking out her tongue she opens and closes her mouth over and over. Makes us laugh every time!

#6 All Done
BB puts her hands up in the air for ALL DONE. By this point she is wondering why in the heck she isn’t out of the highchair already. This may be amended later but since it’s pretty darn clear when she is ALL DONE I’m going to say she has this under her belt.

Does it count if she knows how to do it perfectly but has never used it in combination with actual milk? Either that or I’m ignoring her call for milk. But I don’t think so. It helped that I gave her masking tape to play with. She would hold the tape in her hand and squeeze – release, squeeze – release. Now she knows how to do the sign for milk perfectly. I think it’s amazing that her little hands can make that sign perfectly (even if she hasn’t used it in conjunction with milk.)

Update: She just did the sign for MILK (this afternoon) when I asked her to right before we were going to eat. MILK is definitely her third sign. Yay!

Looked up sheep today and found this interesting site: http://www.lifeprint.com.

BB signed MORE! I noticed the other day when I was signing MORE she started to clap. It finally hit me that she was trying to sign MORE with her tiny little hands! She has been clapping a lot when we eat so she’s been signing more for awhile now. It’s just taken Mommy a bit to catch on.

Teddy Bear

Pacifier

Diaper Change

And found this glossary.