While we recommend teaching your baby certain signs at the beginning of your signing journey, as your signing repertoire grows, you will teach your baby the signs that most interest him or best describe the world as he sees it. The first signs are detailed in our Fast Track to Signing Program. From there, you can use our Baby Sign Dictionary to learn all the signs you might need to teach your baby.
After teaching our son the basics, we added new signs as they came up: on field trips, in books, when introducing new foods, when we wanted to explicitly teach a new concept. There’s no order to follow. Allowing your baby to take the lead will ensure he is motivated to learn. That being said, I wish we had taught him the sign for FIX so much sooner!
We’re the kind of parents who like to foster independence in our child. We show him how to do something, then help him to do it, then encourage him to try it on his own. There are some things though that he is just not capable of doing yet. Some things only mommy and daddy can fix. I guess before we taught him the sign, we would just fix things that needed fixing and give them back to him. If you think about his little self, he would probably have experienced some frustration when playing on his own when he couldn’t fix something.