Strollerderby

We tried, and it worked a little bit. I think the benefit is that it's just another way of interacting with your kid and having fun with them. Even though my daughter can talk up a storm, she will still sign a few words. I'm also still teaching her some fun ones and she seems to enjoy it. Like anything with a toddler once you start pushing too hard it stops being fun in a hurry.

Little bug's favorite signs are hot and helicopter, one of the joys of living in Los Angeles is that we are on the Police chopper flight path so she learned that one early.

I thought about showing my daughter some signs, but to my surprise she started talking so early that by the time she was a year old she had a vocabulary of over 50 words and could communicate pretty freely with us.  She is a total chatterbox and we never really had to guess what was on her mind.  Guess we're lucky.  

I meant to teach my oldest son some signs (he's 5 now).  Actually though, he came up with some gestures for certain things:  food, birds, dog, drink.  There were probably some more.  They definitely weren't ASL signs, but they did the trick.

My second son--well, whatever, I didn't even think about it with him.  And actually, his big brother (2 years older), would always do the talking for him.  ("Gideon wants more food," etc.)  Although the little one was able to bust out the tune to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" at 8 months.

Now my older son is learning ASL in his kindergarten class, and I'm due with my 3rd boy any day now. I figure I'll let the big guy teach the baby signs, and then he can just tell me what the kid is talking about.  :)

We sign a little with our 11-month-olds, they do "more" but I think they think it means "eat".  It also looks a lot like their newly acquired clapping skill, so I'm not sure we've made great communication strides.  It is fun though!

My twins (17 months old) know some signs, and they are also starting to talk to us a lot more. Most of the time they will use a sign and say the word at the same time. I guess for us it was never a way to help them communicate before they could speak words. We have taught them a few Spanish words and a few Gujarati words too. I see ASL as just another language that's fun to learn.

The few times I've come across a friend that has taught their little one sign, it was more of a party trick than anything else - "Look what Alexis can do."  Kind of like teaching your dog to roll over.  It's fun time to spend with them, and a cool learning experience for you both, even leading into more useful lessons (talking for kids, sit/stay for dogs), but maybe not a whole lot of actual use for it.