How does baby signing assist and encourage communication???

Harri Lamming
2 min readSep 7, 2021

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Over the past 15 months, with social distancing restrictions, face masks, limited connect with family and friends and an lot of video calls and facetimes, baby signing can help when communication with youngsters when in public and has increased in popularity in recent years as a way of learning to communicate with children before they can talk.

Dr Joseph Garcia, a child development expert, inspired the idea of teaching babies a range of signs. Understanding language and ability to make gestures develops much faster than a child’s ability to speak. He found that hearing babies of deaf parents easily copied their parents’ signs and used them to communicate, and explored the benefits of hearing parents to hearing children using signing too.

Baby singing is about enhancing communication and language skills not to hinder them or replacing language and it may actually help a child learn to talk and add a fuller range of words to their vocabulary and using signs along with speech enables a child to make the connection between the gesture and the word.

You can use British Sign Language as a foundation for your baby signing, but you can also make up your own gestures that mimics the meaning of the word.

Here’s some baby sign examples;

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Do you use Baby Signing in your setting?

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