I can’t say enough good things about teaching your baby to sign. It seemed to take a while before Sal began signing but it was worth the wait.  We started when he was about 7 months old, did it off and on, but didn’t really see anything happening. I think we were not consistent enough – but Sal started signing when he was 10 months old. His first sign was more, then came water. It was a total eye opener. I had no idea that my little guy was as thirsty as he was! I definitely was not giving him enough water. Right now Sal is in his toddler stage where he understands quite a bit and has a lot of wants and needs and it is really helpful that he can communicate. My only regret has been that I wasn’t more proactive about learning signs and teaching them to him. He’s 15 months old now and has about 40 signs – which I think would be much higher if I had taken the time to learn more signs. He’s even resorted to making up his own signs if we do not show him a sign for something.

Two things besides laziness prevented me from being more proactive:

1 – Wondering what sign to teach him next.

2 – Wondering how to do a sign when I realize Sal is trying to communicate something – and then never finding it.

To help other babies out there out so that their parents don’t have the same road blocks keeping them from learning more – we wanted to provide a list of useful words for your baby to know with links to where you can see how to sign them. Of course – your baby may need to modify some of these so that he or she can do them as well.

Signing is wonderful to get an understanding of what your little one is thinking. As they begin to talk more – it may slowly phase out. Now the words that Sal says he has started to phase out their signs. But as it’s still a bit hard to understand what he’s trying to say – I’m so thankful that
he can do his sign with the word so that I can then start to understand what the word maps to.

Hope this is helpful for some other parents out there as well Let us know if there are any other words you’d like us to include.
- Baby School Mom

all done, finished
apple
ball
banana
bath
bed
bird
blueberries
book
bottle
boy
carrot
change diaper
cheese
class
clean
close
cold
color (verb)
computer
cookie
corn
dog
down
father
fish
flower
hot
hurt
mother
more
no
noodle
open
outside
phone
please
ride
shoes
spoon
teeth
toothbrush
up
what
where
yes