She's Out of the Gate

For a while now I've been waiting for the big "wow". The big "She actually gets it!" moment when it comes to Rachel and signing. Rachel knows many signs and will do them when you ask her a question. Recently, she started initiating signs in order to get what she wants. It started with "food", then "music" and now "juice". But it was always a struggle to get her to identify items by signing. I would point at a picture of a banana and ask Rachel, "What is this?" and she would look and either not sign and walk away or make up a sign like she didn't know. The connection between the sign and a picture just wasn't there.

I have been working on it with her using the picture books she has and she started signing the words when seeing the pictures in the book. I thought that maybe she was only recognizing the pictures in that certain book and that knowledge wouldn't carry over to any other pictures of bananas, for example. Well, my jaw hit the floor today when Rachel started signing hat while holding a block. I thought, does that block actually have a picture of a hat on it?? And sure enough, there was a hat!! So, I picked up a block with an apple on it and asked Rachel what it was a picture of and she signed "apple!" Then I picked up the "fish" block and asked her and without hesitation, she signed "fish!"

Can I tell you how happy this makes me? That she is now seeing different pictures of different items in different locations and knows that they are all the same thing and correctly signing them? It's amazing. This makes me feel like we really are making progress and it's not just memorization and repeating. This makes me look even more forward to Rachel starting school in September. My big girl. You never cease to amaze me!