Teaching Your Baby to Sign

by Lora Heller

Using sign language, babies everywhere are successfully communicating their needs and desires even before they can talk. They are jump-starting their communications and language skills while deepening parent-child bonds. With this adorable board book of simple signs, created by a leading expert in the field who runs her own school in Manhattan, parents can take advantage of a major new trend—one that’s become so popular it was profiled by The New York Times. On every page, cute babies demonstrate the gestures that mean Mommy , Daddy , love , dog , cat , home , sleep , tired , hungry , music , milk , and banana . And because babies very much like looking at photos of other babies, they’ll have fun even as they learn.
The author lives in New York, NY.

24 pages, Board Book

First published August 1, 2004

Reviews

[Libby · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to teach my son some basic signs that are important for communication such as: "eat", "done", "more", "toilet", etc. While it might be good to make them learn others, I don't really have any use for my son to be able to tell me "cat", and so I see no reason to teach him that. By the time he'll care about cats, I hope he can say it out loud. Also, Heller had a good idea- that is to show kids doing the signs, but I think if I didn't already know all the signs myself, it would have been really confusing to know how you should actually do them. Granted, I suppose it's not really important what the sign you use happens to be, as long as you and your child both understand it, but I tend to be an obnoxious purist and I would like to use the "real thing" and the "real thing" was not all that clear.

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I borrowed this book from the library, to read (and participate) with my son. I thought it would be a "cute" read... Well, having some experience with early childhood education I feel that this is not really developmentally appropriate nor conducive to learning and teaching your child sign language.
The book uses young children to demonstrate the signs(which is very cute mind you), but the advantage of having an adult demonstration is that the motions are usually correct. Also (if I'm remembering correctly)there are not pictures of the objects to match the signs. I think that The Sign, Sing, and Play Kit by Monta Briant is more appropriate.
I'm sure many "children's signing books" are simila to Baby Fingers.