Can babies learn to sign by watching signing language DVD’s? Plug-and-play versus connection.
Sure they can. Babies can also learn many other things through television. In fact televisions can also make great substitutes for parents! Of course I’m being tongue in cheek here, but my point is that while the television can teach baby’s to sign, and there are no shortage of easy plug and play format for you to choose from, signing is a means more than just an and.
Signing, just for the sake of signing shouldn’t be one of your goals, but if it is, then go right ahead and pop in that DVD and let it do all the work for you. However, if signing is your bridge to connecting with your preverbal baby, then we’re both on the same page together and my program will work wonders for you. The Definitive Baby Sign Program was meant to educate the educators – the parents. While other courses try to skip this step and go right for the children, the Definitive Baby Sign Program aims to turn parents into active participants in the process so they can gain access to their developing children and learn about their little personalities much sooner than non-signing parents and their babies.
I wont get too aggressive on my condemnation of the DVD programs for kids, as they can make for additional program material, however they shouldn’t be the end of it for you and your baby. When I taught my son to sign, we used several different mediums. We used the Internet to find animal videos and photos, we used books to label various other things and we even used television to expand on our collective experiences. However, we didn’t stop there, we got outdoors to see birds, squirrels, dogs, cats, trees, water, snow and all the good stuff first hand in real life!
While no medium was perfect (not even real life), all of them together put me and my son into today’s word. He learned a little bit about all these things from various angles. In fact, as I type this, I recall tearing pine cones apart to expose their little SEEDS and in the process smell them. Quite fragrant! And if I can make certain about any memory that he and I might share together from an early age, it might just happen to be the smell of fresh pine cones. I highly doubt this could be substituted for any television program.
So while you sign, and while you deliberate on which techniques you might use to sign and from which program, consider what angle you want to teach from. Will you want to just plug-and-play or are you really looking to connect?