When I was making a baby shower gift for a friend last year, I bought her a few books on baby sign language because she was planning to teach her baby signing with the sign language we both remembered learning in school! But I wanted to get flash cards as well, but couldn’t find any. We were talking about it a few days back and thought I would see if I could find flash cards now, and discovered there are several places where you can print baby sign language flash cards online!
What you need:
Card stock to print cards on
Pencil crayons or felts to decorate the cards (they are in black and white)
Elastic band or small box to keep them all together when not being used
Laminate (optional) – if you have access to a cheap laminator, you can laminate them to prolong the life of your cards and pass them on to others later!
Sources to print your own baby sign language flash cards:
Print n Learn has a nice set of free flash cards with the letters preprinted with the signs.
Enchanted Learning has free ABC flash cards. You will need to put the letter on the front/back (your preference)
ABC Teach has some nice ones, but you need to pay a yearly membership fee for them (well, if you want to go beyond the first few letters!). Comes in color, black & white or grayscale. Letters are shown in the front of the card though. (Check out Child of the Nature Isle blog to see how they colored and used the cards, awesome!)
Sources to buy baby sign language flash cards:
If you are looking for some flash card sets for a gift, here are some of the popular flash cards on Amazon. But making flash cards for your gift would be an awesome gift, especially if you color them with style 🙂
I also wanted to include a link to this awesome placemat – it has sign language alphabet on the front so you can reinforce sign language at meal time too! File this one under things I wished I thought of first!
More from moms doing baby sign language:
I also wanted to include some more reading on doing baby sign language from moms, so check them out!
- Child of the Nature Isle blog, the blog I linked above, and she also writes about a game with the flash cards you can try too.
- Mocobabies is a baby signing blog with some good tips, and here is a contest she just posted about where you can win some of their signing products.
- GoGrahamGo has some tips for using flash cards with babies and toddlers.
- Adventures in Mommyland has a blog post with some first hand experience with baby sign language.
- Baby Development Blog is asking If your baby became very vocal, did you continue to use signs? A few parents answered this a couple of days ago, I would think it would be habit, but see what others are saying and add your own.
- Alli-n-son has some tips on starting baby sign language.
- Familia Kiki has some pics and commentary of adorable Aki doing sign language.
- MommaMind has thoughts on why baby sign language is important.
Don’t forget many community centers offer classes on baby signing now or ask at your local parenting group or baby store and see who they recommend. It is fun to get together with other moms and learn signing together.
Last but not least, remember Baby Baluga by Raffi? Here is a great video signing Baby Beluga! While it goes to the book, you could easily use the actions to sing the song once you know all the signs.
Thanks for the Baby Beluga video, my son loves that song, so it is great to be able to sign along with it. I am going to print off some flash cards, I have leftover cardstock from doing his first birthday invitations on the computer, I can make them for one of those really boring (to a kid!) birthday presents… It should rank up there above getting socks, although at age one it shouldn’t be as big of a deal!
I’ve had Baby Beluga stuck in my head since I wrote this post!
A great post, with fabulous resources. I’m so honoured to be included among them. Thanks for the link-up to my posts!
Thanks so much for linking back to the guest post on my site!
Thanks for the great resources! I have been a little lazy with our signing lately, but my 11 month old has been doing great with basic signs like “more” and “milk” and “eat”. I hope we can keep it up!
How wonderful. I taught my last two children how to sign before they could speak. By 8 months old they could sign and it made life so much easier. I home school my children and want to work with them on second languages, signing being one of them, so these flash cards will be a fantastic resource. I also have a 5 month old grand child and am going to teach him to sign.