Using ASL with INFANTS:

• Allows babies to communicate before they can speak - The ability to purposefully communicate develops at around 6 months, long before the baby has the musculature necessary to produce oral speech. Babies are already waving bye-bye, pointing, and raising their arms to be picked up. Signing simply builds upon the baby's natural tendency to use gestures.
• Decreases baby's frustration - Babies can purposefully communicate by six months but their inability for verbally communicate causes frustration. Signing is a wonderful tool that allows babies to clearly communicate their wants and needs.
• Accelerates verbal language development - Contrary to fears that signing delays language development, the fact is that signing actually accelerates growth. Research indicates that babies who sign usually begin to speak sooner and develop larger vocabularies than non-signing babies.
• Helps establish critical social skills for communication - Children have an easier time expressing their needs and having them met. Signing allows children to connect with their environment and develop important means-end relationships and social skills even before they can produce words. These skills lay the foundation for later developing language skills.
• Serves as a language bridge - Signing can help cement or solidify vocabulary and concepts in the native language and serve as a language bridge when learning a second language. The same sign is used for "milk" whether the spoken word is said in English or said in Spanish "leche".
• Decreases separation anxiety - When your baby knows that he is entering an environment in which his needs and wants are understood, it helps to minimize the separation anxiety. The consistency in communication between you, your caregiver, and your baby alleviates apprehension on the baby's part, allowing for an easier transition from one setting to another.
• Maximizes unique bonding with parent - Signing requires gaining your babies focus, attention, and eye contact, all prerequisites for establishing a greater connection and bonding experience. Furthermore, signing is a two-way form of communication, offering you insight into what your baby is thinking.
• Promotes brain development - For years researchers have known that oral language primarily stimulates only the left hemisphere of the brain and spoken language uses only hearing pathways. The visual cortex matures faster than the auditory cortex. When you pair signing with the verbal input you stimulate both hemispheres, creating greater connections and brain function.
• Signing reinforces verbal language - by adding visual and kinesthetic emphasis to auditory input.
• Facilitates important cognitive skills - to support communication (e.g., imitation, symbolic function).




Using ASL with TODDLERS:

• Builds self esteem - Since ASL is visual and often iconic, signs are quickly learned, understood, and used to communicate, offering a strong sense of empowerment. Children can control the topic of conversation and express their interests at an early age.
• Minimizes the terrible two's - Frustration from the inability to identify and express feelings plays a critical role in toddler's tantrums. Signing not only helps toddlers label their feelings but it can often times be used as tool, by both parents and toddlers, to facilitate the expression of feelings more appropriately.
• Helps parents make sense of their toddler's speech - When signs are used in conjunction with talking, parents can easily distinguish their toddler's speech. Suddenly, "ba" becomes ball, bottle, book, or balloon and "ma" becomes more, milk, and mom.
• A "bridge" of communication is built with preverbal children. Virtually all children who are learning to talk use gesture before they use words. Language comes in three modes: Gestural, Oral, and Written and we learn to use these modes in this order.
• Enhances and accelerates vocabulary and early language skills - Signing continues to bridge the gap between a child's ability to understand (receptive) language and verbally communicate (expressive) skills. Signing begins to formulate an earlier and more developed language path in the brain. By age 2, toddlers need to have approximately 35-50 words in their verbal repertoire and begin to form two-word utterances.
• Serves as a language bridge between languages other than English - The sign is the same for "eat" (English) as it is for "comer" (Spanish).




Using ASL with PRESCHOOLERS and KINDERGARTENERS:

• It's fun for children, parents and educators - Signing adds fun to daily routines and learning activities.
• Increases I.Q. by 8 to 12 points - Clinical research demonstrates that children using sign language outperform non-signers by 8 to 12 points on WISC intelligence tests and score higher on the PPVT.
• Enhances classroom management - Provides teachers who struggle with classroom management, an effective strategy through sign language. Signing significantly reduces aggressive behavior, biting problems, and noisy classrooms.
• Children learn at an early age that speech has visual representations at the "word" and at the "phoneme" level - This is an important precursor to literacy. Signing and finger spelling can be especially helpful when deciphering the alphabetic code with an opaque language such as English versus a transparent language such as Spanish.
• Increases bilateral brain processing - Sign stimulates both hemispheres, oral language primarily stimulates only the left hemisphere. It's a two-sided brain activity that increases brain functioning and creates additional connections or synapses in the brain
• Aids in focus, attention, retention, and retrieval - For many children, their difficulty learning oral language is related to a reduced capacity and function of their working memory. Unlike the spoken word that can be forgotten after it's heard, we can show the child a sign and hold it for as long as it takes for the child to process it and move it into long term memory.
• Builds a "bridge" between two spoken languages for ELLs - The fact that second language learners have an opportunity to learn the concept of a word is of critical importance. This facilitates the process of second language learning when introduced to a foreign language and the learning process is accelerated when the child understands the "concept" of a word and only has to learn the new "label".
• Helps in the cross-linguistic transfer from one language to the other - Allows children to easily transfer information learned from one language to another.
• Motor coordination and language development can happen simultaneously.
• All learning styles are supported - when you use ASL in the classroom as each child can hear, see, and move to express the concept or vocabulary you are teaching.
• Effective intervention strategy for developing emergent literacy skills - By adding visual and kinesthetic emphasis to auditory input, signing has been proven to enhance early literacy skills for success in reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling, and memory.
• Children's brains process sign more efficiently than words - ASL is not only a language boost but it is a brain boost. ASL supports early brain development in the areas of communication, attention, bonding, and visual learning.
• Easy to integrate ASL into the curriculum when educators understand that you are not teaching ASL as a language but utilizing ASL to support language development and enrich vocabulary by adding a visual and kinesthetic stimuli to an auditory input.
• Children with special needs gain a means of expressing themselves and the opportunity to interact in a meaningful way with caregivers, teachers, and typically-developing children - Many children with expressive language difficulties, Autism, Down Syndrome, etc. learn ASL in order to effectively communicate with the people around them.
• Builds the foundation for the third most used language in the United States - Due to the increasing amount of high schools and colleges accepting ASL for foreign language credit, and the growing amount of job opportunities for people fluent in ASL, signing classes for children and students are bursting at the seams. Give your child a head start on this emerging opportunity.
• "My belief is that ASL can help every child because it creates a multisensory learning experience (Visual by watching it, Auditory by saying the word, and Physical by making the sign). The more multisensory a learning experience is, the more pathways our brain creates to store and later recall and retrieve new information learned." Gloria Rojas