I was first made aware of the benefits of teaching sign-language to hearing babies before I went to university. I saw a documentary and watched in amazement as tiny tots conveyed their wants, needs, emotions and observations simply and clearly to their parents.

I vowed there and then that I would teach my own children to sign, as and when the time came; and so in June 2003, when my son Kenzie was just three and a half months old, I bought myself a sign-language book and began gesticulating enthusiastically with signs that were relevent to him at that stage; ‘milk’, sleep’, ‘Mummy’ etc’. My efforts were rewarded when, at age seven and a half months, Kenzie pointed to his rubber duck and performed a perfect ‘duck’ sign! By the time he was a year old, he could make around forty signs, including several animals along with common words like ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘bath’, ‘bed’, ‘food’, ‘tired’ and more.

I cannot express what a difference it made to our lives. Kenzie was able to tell me what he wanted or was feeling, and also about things he saw when we were out and about, or reading a book together. It also helped tremendously when I went back to work and he went to nursery. He was able to tell his carers what he wanted and, whenever I picked him up, they asked me to interpret what his signs meant. Knowing that he could make himself understood helped him, I am sure, to become the confident, self-assured and highly articulate schoolboy he is today.

Kenzie was able to tell me what he wanted or was feeling, and also about things he saw when we were out and about, or reading a book together.

In May 2004 I was unexpectedly made redundant from my marketing job. After the initial shock wore off, I realised that I no longer wanted to work for someone else, and miss out on seeing my son grow up, so I started to think about what I could do instead that would allow me an income as well as quality ‘Mum-time’! My passion lies in the performing arts and having trained and worked as an actress previously and then as a drama teacher, I knew this was more in-line with what I wanted to do. My experiences with baby-signing had also greatly inspired me so I decided to incorporate my love of singing and teaching with the idea of sharing the benefits of signing with other Mums. And so In September 2004, Sign & Rhyme was launched.

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Kenzie signs "mouse"!

Teaching babies to sign is very simple. Sign language is actually a lot more common than most people think; for example when we wave at someone, or give a ‘thumbs-up’ sign. Unwittingly, we often pass these signs onto our children, who in many cases pick up a variety of signs even before their first birthday. Sign & Rhyme teaches parents and in turn their children, a basic vocabulary of signs that are incorporated into weekly themes such as ‘food and drink’, ‘out and about’, ‘weather’ etc. The signs are then used like actions, within a nursery rhyme context to make learning more enjoyable. We also use a host of different props and pictures to reinforce the concepts and add to the fun. The signs we use at Sign & Rhyme are almost entirely British Sign Language signs and therefore there is a near inexhaustable vocabulary that could be taught. However, as signing with hearing babies is only really used as a bridge until speach takes over, most parents will find the need to use up to about 100 signs at most.

In recent years, the frustrations of thousands of parents, carers and their very young children have been eased thanks to the innovative new technique of teaching hearing babies simple sign language before they can even speak. The concept was pioneered in the USA in the 1980s by two psychologists, Linda Acredola and Susan Goodwin. Working with children who had one hearing and one deaf parent, they discovered that, in almost every instance, the children learnt to communicate through sign language far sooner than they learned to talk. Acredola and Goodwin began a programme using 140 babies who were divided into two groups: ‘baby-signers’ and ‘non-baby-signers’. The children were monitored at regular intervals throughout their childhood and into early adulthood. Those who had been taught to sign excelled noticeably from the outset: by the age of 3, most baby-signers were talking as well as 4-year-olds, while they also outperformed their peers in literacy and IQ tests. These findings suggested that there are significant long-term advantages to learning to sign at such an early age, as well as the more immediate benefits apparent before speech develops.