05/03/2017
My signing story
by Erin McKenna
Founder, Sign-Along Stories™
My experience with baby sign language began when I was six months pregnant with my first child. My friend who was also pregnant with her first asked me if I was planning to teach sign language to my baby. I had never thought of or heard of the idea before. I was much more excited about my plan to raise my children in a Spanish-English bilingual manner (my husband is Peruvian and we are both bilingual) and I told her I would consider it, but it wasn’t my priority. Several months later, when my son was born with Down syndrome, I slowly began to realize that sign language was going to become a very important part of his linguistic journey. Although I had no plan for teaching it, whenever I came across second-hand sign language materials in his first couple months, I scooped them up. Some of these were ASL guides, others baby signing guides, and all of them provided a dictionary of many, many words.
The materials I read generally advised to start teaching signs when the child is starting to wave hi/bye. Since my son wasn’t waving by his first birthday, I decided I should still start that summer after he turned one. We started with ‘more’ and since it took him over six months to learn/use that sign consistently, that is where we stayed for a long time. I didn’t push myself to learn and use a bunch of other signs largely because there was no easy way for me to do that other than taking the time to study the signing books and dictionaries. Since my son had not yet mastered the first sign and I was busy writing my dissertation it just was not something at the top of my priority list. In addition, the only time I really thought to work with my son on the word ‘more’ was during mealtimes when my hands were free and my son was in his high chair. Thus, when he did finally start using the sign, it meant ‘eat’ to him for a really long time.
About the time we started working on ‘more’, my son’s Speech Therapist lent us a Signing Time DVD and some board books with baby signs—books that had one word per page and had pictures of babies doing the signs along with other images reflective of the word. Around that same time our library launched its 1000 Books Before Kindergarten program. I had always done a lot of reading with my son, but this made me even more conscientious of the books I was reading. It didn’t seem like books that had a total of 12 or 14 words could count as a book for the program. In addition, the books weren’t fun to read and unless I decided to focus and memorize the words, I didn’t remember them to be able to use them when the right context arose. I felt similar when I watched the Signing Time DVD—there were too many words to remember even when I was really focused on learning the words in the episode. In addition, my then under two-year-old son, who, other than that, had not been exposed to any screens, was not interested in taking his cues from anything on the TV. He may have watched for five minutes before he became completely disengaged. So, we had no comfortable tools that fit into our routine that allowed me to learn the signs and expose my son to them. From this situation emerged Sign-Along Stories™ designed to teach and re-enforce sign language use.
My interest in filling this void in baby signing resources has led me to learn and use more signs and my son has since picked up on many of them. My twelve-month daughter is also starting to sign. I do not consider myself a signing expert and that is not my aspiration. Signing and language development is just one of the areas that demands my attention, especially for my son’s development. Thus, I plan to incorporate signs, as needed, to facilitate my children’s communication and linguistic development. Meanwhile, I will do what I can to make sign-language acquisition for others as seamless a process as I would have liked it to be for me through Sign-Along Stories™ and Sign-Along Story Time℠ programs.
