Noah’s World

Welcome to Noah’s Signing Page! Ever since his was 8 or 9 months old, we’ve been signing with Noah. Is he deaf, you might ask? No, Noah has excellent hearing – we use sign language as a supplement to his natural verbal development. You can see more benefits about teaching your children how to sign at the Signing Time site here.

At about 12 months we got our first reply from Noah – he signed “milk” – months before he started to talk. After that, it was a snowball effect – he was absorbing signs at an amazing pace, and we were able to learn them as well by watching Signing Time with him. Pretty soon, before we knew it, Noah had 20 or 30 signs under his belt, way before he could ever verbalize them! Here’s a video of him signing around 15 months :

Pretty soon though, Noah started to speak (contrary to some beliefs that signing actually delays verbal development) and in time, the number of words finally caught up with the number of signs he knew (maybe by the time he was 2 or so). We believe that signing actually helped his verbal development by laying down some of the neural connections dealing with words and concepts months earlier than what they would’ve formed normally. This allowed him to start saying a lot of words in short time, speak in long sentences, and in short – speak in a way you never thought a 2 year old would speak.

And speaking of being 2, we’ve found that during terrible 2 tantrums, where he refuses to listen to us verbally, we can sometimes use signs to get through to him, allowing us to lessen the tantrum’s duration and severity.

In short – we can’t imagine having raised Noah without teaching him how to sign – the ability to communicate with him and form such a strong bond at such an early age has made the first few years with him a pure joy. Better yet – helping Noah learn how to talk so early has given him the chance to have a very expanded vocabulary (for a 2 year old), learn grammar early on, and we think – helped him become a very smart boy!