Written By Catherine Brown, M.A., CCC-SLP

The buzz word is literacy… All around we hear about the importance of literacy. Parents are told to read, read, read to their children, without much formal instruction on what this means. We are even teaching our children about the alphabet before they can talk! We hear about the No Child Left Behind program, and getting government funding for innovative programs these days usually means proving that your program relates to literacy development. If you are trying to hook up with programs with a literacy emphasis, you know what I am talking about! Since literacy has become such a hot topic, with such important consequences, it might be good to review some of the important connections that using the Baby Signs^® Program can have for literacy development.

First, though we traditionally think of literacy as the ability to read, it is now recognized that the skills needed in the technologically advanced world in which we live go beyond reading. The National Institute for Literacy defines literacy as "an individual's ability to read, write, speak in English, compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual, and in society." The development of literacy starts well before the school years, although that is where the formal instruction in reading takes place. At first the goal is to help children learn to read. Later, the focus shifts to helping children learn to read.

Educational guidelines for reading must now be in compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which defines reading skills as "a complex system of deriving meaning from print that requires all of the following: (a) “The skills and knowledge to understand how phonemes, or speech sounds, are connected to print” (b) “The ability to decode unfamiliar words” (c) “The ability to read fluently” (d) “Sufficient background information and vocabulary to foster reading comprehension” (e) “The development of appropriate active strategies to construct meaning from print” and (f) “The development and maintenance of a motivation to read.”

We now know that reading success comes from a set of skills known as “phonological awareness” skills.

These include sound segmentation, letter awareness, rhyming, and book awareness. Research shows that children who have difficulty with reading skills are also poor in these phonological skills. Intervention programs and early literacy programs now target this set of skills rather than just knowing the alphabet. The educational market is flooded with computer programs, books, and materials that address phonological awareness skills. (Our favorite children’s books authors like Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle figured this out a long time ago!)

How does using the Baby Signs^® Program promote literacy development? Well there are several ways that the Baby Signs^® Program relates to the set of skills that children need for later reading:

Baby Signs^® research has shown that infants exposed to signs during infancy had better receptive and expressive language vocabularies by the time they were two years old. This supports the acquisition of adequate vocabulary skills needed for literacy development. Early language and vocabulary supports the oral language skills that lead to the ability to develop written language skills.

In addition, these same infants who learned to use signs as infants had verbal IQ scores that remained high well into the elementary school years when reading development occurs.

Ask any Baby Signs^® family and you will hear that their children love books. Baby Signs^® babies tend to enjoy reading books and telling their parents about their most favorite pages. Knowledge of and interest in books is one of the definitions of literacy, and one of the phonological awareness skills that predicts later reading success. In addition, our four board books are very popular with our families, and we are encouraging parents and children to read together and further foster this interest in books. Parents also report that their toddlers sit down and read their books by signing to themselves.

Songs and rhymes. One of the ways that parents teach signs is through rhymes and songs. That’s why we’ ve incorporated so many signable songs into our Sign, Say & Play^TM curriculum. The rhymes and the rhythm that we expose children to while we are singing and signing are related to the phonological abilities that are needed later for reading.

how the Baby Signs^® Program is related to literacy development, you will have good information to share. While there is an overwhelming amount of information available on the topic of reading development and literacy, here are some links that I like:

Referenced in this article:

http://www.famlit.org/Resources/ ReadingTips/ParentsGuide/ index.cfm

http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/ facts_overview.html

For more information, you can checkout some of the following websites.

http://www.getreadytoread.org/ early.html

http://www.ed.gov/parents/academic/ help/reader/index.html