Cowplanet

Signing back

August 27th, 2011

When our girl was just eight months old, a friend with an older child (also German-French) told me about baby signing and lent me some books and DVDs. I had been sceptical before, thinking it was just the latest fad, but now I read about it, I wanted to give it a try.
The books claimed signing didn’t delay speech, on the contrary, so I thought, what harm could it do?

We started out with four signs: eat, drink, more and all done. However, the only one we really used consequently over the months was “all done”.
Here is what it is supposed to look like according to Baby Signs®:

© Baby Signs

In July, so after about five months, our little girl started to make hand movements when we were in an “all done” situation, namely when her food bowl was empty, and said “alles alle” (or “fini fini”) and made the sign.
More recently, she has done so prompted only by the situation and the words, without us signing.
And finally, last week, she signed without prompting, to tell me she didn’t want any more water (so her bottle wasn’t empty).
This is what her version of the sign looks like:


(opening and closing both hands)

We are trying her to pick up “eat” and “drink” now, but it’s not easy to remember it all the time. We’ll see.

On the fun side, this is what she does when we say “Oh no!” in either language:

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