Summary of Benefits:

• Engages the child’s multiple intelligences in representing language symbolically.
• Develops phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principal, vocabulary, and spelling skills.
• Facilitates a comfort in expressing and understanding feelings.
• Fingerspelling develops the small muscles necessary for writing.
• Develops all communication skills, which provide the window to basic literacy and academic excellence across disciplines.

“It should be remembered that we speak more than we write.  Throughout our lives we judge others, and we ourselves are judged, by what we say and how we speak.” – Ernest Boyer

• Encourages the child to share school experience sat home.
• Builds community through shared language experiences.
• Provides a constructive physical outlet for the kinesthetic learner.
• Combines “saying and doing,” which increases retention of language and concepts by 90%.
• Provides a natural bridge for limited English speaking children in developing a second language.
• Engages the high-risk learners in building confidence and enthusiasm for learning.
• Encourages the whole child to focus attention on learning.
• Provides an introduction to the beautiful visual gestural language of ASL.
• Accelerates learning in the child’s first and second language, bridging the achievement gap.
• Personalizes language and concepts through “total emotional body response.”
• Can lead to memorable performances for parents.
• Builds comprehension by creating internal images of language.
• Is supported by brain research and language acquisition theory.
• Singing and signing fluently with expression, gesture, and confidence builds children’s speaking skills.
• Supports inclusion programs.
• Teaches life skills.  ASL is the third most common language in the United States.

“Our job is not to help kids do well in school.  It’s to help them do well in life.”

– Elliot Eisner, Speech to the National Staff Development Council, December 1991

• Reading the 3-dimensional language of sign develops visual skills for reading printed language.
• Provides Talented and Gifted (TAG) students a challenge – one that parents love!

See: Dancing With Words: Signing for Hearing Children's Literacy, by Marilyn Daniels
The Magic of Signing Songs: Enhancing All Children's Language and Literacy , by Nellie Edge