I love sign language.  When I was in 5th grade my teacher taught our class the alphabet as well as some other signs she knew.  To this day I remember most of the alphabet even though I found no need to use it until I began signing with my daughter 3 1/2 years ago.  I am a big advocate of early childhood education.  After teaching all of my kids to read before they were 5 years old and teaching my infant son to read, I knew that babies have an unfathomable potential to easily learn what we expose them to.  When I had baby number 6 and happened to learn about the Signing Time series, I was hooked.

A friend let me borrow a Signing Time DVD and I loved it.  It was so easy to learn sign language.  At the end of the 30 minute video, I could easily remember all the signs.  A sign language explosion began in our home.  All of my children were on board and we began to learn as much sign language as we could.  We used online dictionaries to learn new words and expand our vocabularies.  It was a whole lot of fun.

So where are we now?  Well, I would say that the sign that has proven to be the most useful is "I love you."  We use that countless times throughout the day to tell each other we love them.  Besides that, I am sad to say, we have outgrown sign language.  My youngest is 4 years old now and can communicate perfectly, so she has no need to sign that she is hungry or thirsty.  The biggest disappointment to me was that when we had the opportunity to see deaf people at the grocery store, we really couldn't communicate with them beyond a few words.  We were unable to really have a conversation.  I wish we could have taken it to that level, but it requires a huge commitment of time and resources that we did not have.

The sign language that most parents are teaching their babies will never be more than one or two word communication.  Because of this, it is really just a phase that they will outgrow.  Unless there are deaf people in the family, a baby's ability to sign will flourish for awhile and then the need to sign will diminish.

This has left me thinking about sign language and the role it plays in a child's development.  Should we sign to our babies?  Sure.  It is a nice tool to use for basic communication before the child is able to speak.  Should we devote ourselves to it?  That is up to the parent.  Looking back, I would not have spent so much time learning and teaching sign language to my daughter.  Having taught  my infant son to read, I realize that the ability to read is something we never outgrow.  Knowing how to read is something we will do everyday for the rest of our lives.  If I could do it all over again, I would have focused on teaching my daughter to read.  I did devote time to teaching her to read, but not as much as I did with teaching her to sign.

She just turned 4 and her reading skills are well above her peers.  She is very articulate and has a large vocabulary.  She loves to read books and be read to, but she is not reading at the level that her brother was at this age.  

Looking back, I have realized that teaching babies to read is more important than teaching them to sign.  It is easy to do and does not require large amounts of time.  It is a language we already know.  If we know how to read, we can teach our babies to read.  The same materials I used to teach my daughter to sign are available to teach babies to read.  Parents can use videos, flash cards and books to give their baby a strong start in reading.  The nice thing is that parents know how to move a child from reading one or two words to reading sentences and books.  This is not easily done with sign language.

We have found the MonkiSee Baby Reading Program to be very beneficial in teaching our 3 year old to read. She really enjoys the flash cards and learns the words quickly.  At this point we show her about 20 words a few times a day and she knows most of them after seeing them just a few times.  We read the books and point out the words and now she is reading them on her own.  We do plenty of reading and text pointing as we read to help her recognize new words as well.  Although our focus in teaching her to read was not present in her first years, we can definitely see that she is learning to read very well.

Check out the MonkiSee video clips online and see if your baby is ready to learn to read too.