Video: The How, Where and Who of Baby Signing

Video Transcript

Hi I'm Therese Markham from TinyTalk in Warrington and on behalf of babyandPregnancy.co.uk today I'm going to give you the how, where and who of baby signing.

How do you start baby signing? First of start with a couple of relevant signs, signs that are relevant to your baby and in most cases this is a sign for milk and for food. Don't run before you walk, please don't try to do 6,7,8,9,10 just stick with a couple of basic signs.

The reason why we encourage people to start with milk and food is because hunger and thirst are the main cause of tears. Using the milk sign in my own house worked wonderful with my own daughter, Hannah would wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning crying her eyes out but if I went into her bedroom she would be sitting in her cot making the milk sign telling me what was the matter with her. I could deal with it and we would be both back in bed asleep and happy just a few minutes later.

Always sign in context have the object present so for example if you are using the sign for milk have the bottle of milk there. The babies will recognise the bottle of milk, you also say the relevant word, giving them a word to concentrate on. The word they are going to be familiar with and then you are going to throw something else in for them to concentrate on which is a sign for milk.

Always have you babies attention make sure they are facing you, watching you, if you don't have their attention there is no point doing any signs with them.

Repeat the sign several times whilst the object is there and also whilst the event is actually occurring, repetition really is the key helping a baby to baby-sign.

After you have introduced a couple of signs that they recognise you can start to introduce other signs slowly for example if you have pet, if you have a cat you can introduce the cat sign, babies love animals and like to watch the animals.

Where do you baby-sign, well basically you can baby sign anywhere, when your out for a walk, when your in your house, when your driving down the road, when your visiting a farm, families you can do baby signing absolutely anywhere.

I used to love taking our daughter out for a walk in our push chair, round to our local shops, she would be sitting their telling me that she could see the cars driving passed she could hear the birds in the trees, and oh look mummy a doggy has just walked passed with their owner.

Who baby signs well basically everybody involved with the child care baby sign, you as parents, the extended family any grandparents, aunties, uncles, friends that are around the baby on a regular basis needs to baby sign with them. This helps with the repletion and the consistency it also means that when the baby does start to baby sign back whoever actually knows what the baby is meaning and the frustration levels that we have actually brought down with the signing and they don't start to go up because grandma doesn't know what this means when she is looking after him in the afternoon.