Signs We Have Used

Now that Bilby is (somewhat!) reliably waving, we're making a real 'push' to sign with her. That of course means I need to remember what the signs are! (We decided that if we were learning signs anyway, it made sense to learn the Auslan ones—that way they may be useful beyond simply the baby stage.)

With Puggle, we'd borrowed a friend's Auslan dictionary so we were able to look up words as we needed them. I had looked online, but the only signs I could find information on were ASL. Now though, I've found the Auslan SignBook. That will come in handy:-)

More
All done/Finished
Food
Drink (although, Puggle didn't use exactly the sign we did... he reliably chose the sign for 'beer' instead!)
Breast milk
Cat
Dinosaur
Sleep
Book
Bath (we'll a different sign with Bilby... I realised later that there were a couple of options... the one that Makaton uses is much more simple!)

My memory was that he had a large signing vocabulary (and I know we looked up a number of other words), but this is the list of words he was regularly signing at twenty-one months. (I made a note of the words he was speaking and signing before seeing the Child Health Nurse at that time.) It's a much shorter list of signs than I'd realised!

To help get us started, I was pleased to find some books in the baby books box at the library recently. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes..., Baa Baa Black Sheep and My First Signs, all by Annie Kubler. They are British, and BSL and Auslan are related, so I was hopeful that we could use them:-) When I looked through, almost all the signs for words I knew, were what we had used:-) Puggle has enjoyed reading them, and it's encouraged him to use the signs with Bilby...