Our daughter has had a language explosion. I had her out yesterday and she saw a sandwich board sign and stopped so that she could point out the "Geee" and exclaim for all to hear that she had found the G. She also pointed out the "Peee" that is on our "Splash" bathtub mat. It all started when my husband had her outside and she started chanting "twoo twoo twoo" and pointed to the 2 in our house number. It seems that couple of days she adds another word to her vocabulary, it is so exciting.
Our son is still behind in speaking. We had him evaluated by a Speech Language Pathologist and his receptive language is bang on schedule but he has a significant delay in his expressive language. The SLP suggested that we go back to babbling and try to get him to imitate us, but that has had no real success. She also encouraged us to continue with teaching him sign language. My teaching him sign language had relied on watching episodes of Signing Time that we record on the PVR. It was great but now the broadcaster has stopped airing any episodes so we are at a standstill watching the four episodes that I saved on the PVR. Thankfully two of the four episodes have signs that he can use regularly, but I need to start learing more signs to teach him. I also need to ensure that my husband is up to date on all the signs that our son knows so that there aren't too many frustrating moments where he is signing and my husband has no idea what he wants. That said, our son has started to create signs for things and I have no idea what they mean, so I really do need to learn more signs to teach him to fill that gap.
I have to say that teaching the kids sign language has given both of them a leg up on expressing themselves so that they can be understood. Teaching them the signs along with the spoken word seems to reinforce the concept. Now I just need to get my husband to start speaking German so that they start picking up that language too. It's never too early to start right?
Related posts:
