We Sign - How It All Began...

Sign Language is for ALL CHILDREN

Real Benefits for Real People

There has been a growing national trend, brought on by local, state and national requirements on preschools to provide much more instruction and give these children a real foundation of knowledge prior to entering kindergarten. Children today are required to know and have basic understanding of alphabetical letters and their sounds, of numbers, of colors and of things they find all around them in the world. Preschool children are being pushed into having much larger vocabularies and informational knowledge then at anytime in our countries history.

Parents are feeling this pressure and are beginning, at a very young age, to begin to provide for their children learning opportunities and programs that are geared making them smarter and better prepared for school. We do these things as responsible parents, in an effort go give our children the beset opportunity possible for their future. We do these things because we love our children.

Today parents are bombarded with lots of products all of which are designed to support and enhance the learning process in young children. If children do this, they will be smarter, if they listen to this type of music, they will be smarter, if they play these games they will be smarter. But what really works?

We are told over and over that “studies show” this and “studies show” that. So many things will work. Yet I, as a father of 4 and a grandfather of 3 and a professional who has worked with hundreds of thousands of kids really question some of the claims. Somehow, rat studies and college student studies about listening to classical music making children smarter don't ring well with me. Now playing an instrument helping children be smarter rings true. Some how games that require too much work and not enough fun don't ring well with me but activities that children want to do over and over make sense to me. I know that since the inception of We Sign and all our products, I am also part of a company making the claims about “smarter children” and helping to “better prepare them for kindergarten and beyond.” So why is signing right and listening to classical music or watching colorful images on the TV … not right?

This brings me to the point where human history, thousands of years of cultural development, has demonstrated to us what scientists have put into recent theories. It's really very simple; we have always known that young children learn best when they are learning through active, playful involvement. They learn best when interacting with parents, older children and teachers. This timeless knowledge today is wrapped around theories about movement and learning, about play and learning and about providing activities that involve the use of Multiple – Intelligences (physical learning, visual learning, verbal learning, mathematical learning, musical learning, and interpersonal learning).

What helps children to learn and remember? What provides children with information, vocabulary and skills they will need upon entering school? The answer is found in fun, playful, interactive activities that involve the use of Multiple Intelligences to provide children with educational and entertaining programming. I'm not sure I really trust other get smart claims.

This brings me to We Sign, a product and concept that I helped to develop over the past 14 years, and our claims that signing as part of daily communication and play time activities will make children smarter and better prepare children for school.

It is my hope that parents, teachers or anyone who loves and works with children would look to the information that is available about products and their claims and evaluate them, analyze them and decide on their value. It is also my hope that you would take the time to look into the use of Sign Language, music, movement and play as a valuable way for children to learn.

We Sign is a program that uses our ageless knowledge about involving children in learning and combines that knowledge with the use of American Sign Language. Children as young as 10 months, have the physical and mental ability to sign words and to communicate. Repeated research has shown that children who use sign as part of their daily activities will have up to twice the usable vocabulary (signed and spoken words) than their counter parts. The larger the vocabulary, the better the reading readiness and reading skills are the key to all future education. Signing has been proven to allow children the ability to learn and use much more vocabulary.

It has been said that throughout human history we could teach almost anything with song. By combining the visual and movement nature of sign with the playful nature of song, We Sign provides an activity that helps memory retention, expands vocabulary, and actively involves children, parents, teachers and other caregivers. This activity can be actively participated in while watching TV or without the TV as children and others can sing and sign almost anywhere.

I have always felt that one of the best places to find out about the benefits for signing with children is a book by Marilyn Daniels called Dancing With Words. She outlines her research as well as others and has complied a resource for parents and teachers to read, learn and make up their minds about the claims that We Sign and other signing products for hearing children make. You will find that children who sign have been shown statistically to have larger vocabularies, enhanced language skills, score better on IQ tests and have greater memory and retention skills. She demonstrates how various researchers have found that signing with children is fun, playful, improves self-esteem and helps to develop a real enthusiasm for learning.

We Sign and its products work to help children to develop larger vocabularies and to learn and remember basic educational concepts (ABC's, numbers, colors, animals, rhymes and more) because we encourage active participation. Singing and signing requires movement and uses almost all of the Multiple-Intelligences at the same time. Our songs can become part of every child's play time with the knowledge that this fun playful activity is also providing them with information they will need to know upon entering kindergarten today.

If you look up the research or if you read Dancing with words, you will see the value in signing with all children. You will see this as an activity that involves them in the learning process, helps them to remember information and provides them with hours of interactive, educational fun.