Sing & Sign for Young Children: A Guide for Early Childhood Professionals

Research shows that teaching sign language to all young children has a wide range of benefits, from enhancing social‐emotional and preliteracy skills to supporting positive parent‐child relationships. With Sing & Sign for Young Children, early childhood professionals will have a fun, easy, and highly effective way to teach and practice key ASL sign vocabulary through music and play during everyday classroom routines.

Packed with engaging sign language activities and original, kid‐friendly songs, this innovative program was created by a music therapist and early childhood specialist with years of experience working and playing with young children. Dr. Anne Meeker Watson, creator of the SING.PLAY.LOVE.?R) program, shows you how to transform your daily activities--including arrival, mealtime, shared book reading, free play, and departure--into joyful learning opportunities infused with music, play, and warm adult‐child connections. You'll get everything you need to implement the program when you purchase the book: original songs with lyrics and scores, guidance and tips for beginning the program, pictures of all the signs and hand formations, suggested activities and games, a list of additional resources, and videos modeling signs for each song.

• Strengthens skills essential for academic and social success: communication, social‐emotional, self‐regulation, and literacy skills
• Combines signing with music--a powerful, motivating, and neurologically rich experience for young children
• Helps children build positive, meaningful relationships with each other and with their educators and caregivers
• Infuses the school day with joy and fun, creating an environment that's conducive to sustained attention and engagement
• Gives children many chances to practice and demonstrate new skills across daily routines
• Helps support communication development for all children, including dual language learners and children with language delays

DOWNLOADABLE MATERIALS: Put Sing & Sign into action with a complete package of downloadable online materials, including 13 audio recordings, 18 instructional videos, and 18 printable pages of song cards, instructions, and photographs and illustrations of key vocabulary words. (Vocabulary word pages are available in both English and Spanish.)