I’m so excited to share with you this printable guide to using Nita’s First Signs in the classroom or storytime! Check it out for tips and tricks for sharing signs during the story, and following up with other fun ASL activities. Click here or on the picture below to download and print your own copy.
If you’re looking for resources to share American Sign Language with your students or storytime attendees, check out the Little Hands Signing Storytime & Craft Ideas board on Pinterest! It’s where I pin my favorite ideas from around the internet for sharing ASL with kids, and gather links to my own videos showcasing signing rhymes and songs. Check it out!
Published by Familius Press!
American Sign Language makes it easy to communicate with your child, and Nita makes it fun! Nita’s First Signs teaches ten essential signs for every parent and child to know, including eat, more, hungry, milk, all done, ball, play, love, please, and thank you. A simple story about Nita and her parents teaches each sign in context, and repetition throughout each story makes them easy to practice. Even better, each page slides open to reveal accurate instructions on how to make each sign, plus tabs on the side of each page make it simple to locate every sign for later reference.
Makes a great baby shower gift!
Order now from the Deaf Camps, Inc. Online Bookstore (autographed copies that support a great cause!) | amazon.com | barnesandnoble.com | indiebound.org or ask for it at your local library!
“Little Hands Signing” was featured in the June 13 edition of the Carroll County Times! Click here to read the article.
These excellent videos are perfect for both Deaf and hearing families! Native signers Missy Keast and Manny Hernandez appear in front of the pictures and English text, telling the story on each page in American Sign Language. Weston Woods, long known for its high-quality visual adaptations of picture books, applies its signature style to these DVDs, making them fully accessible for both Deaf audiences and hearing non-signers. Each DVD also features:
Titles available in this series:
Big Al by Andrew Clements, illustrated by Yoshi: Big Al is large and scary-looking , so the little fish are afraid of him.Then he gets to prove what a good friend he can be!
Blue Burt and Wiggles by Derek Anderson: An unusual friendship develops between a bird and a worm, showing how common concerns lead to unusual friendships.
A Creature Was Stirring by Carter Goodrich: A little boy says that, despite what everyone thinks, he was the only creature stirring in the house that Christmas Eve.
Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed by Eileen Christelow: As soon as they say goodnight to Mama, five little monkeys start to jump on their bed. But trouble lies ahead.
Gladys Goes Out to Lunch by Derek Anderson: One day Gladys smells something delicious and leaves the zoo to find out what it is…and the adventure begins.
Little Quack by Lauren Thompson: Splish! Splash! Splosh! Can Little Quack find the courage to join his brothers and sisters in the pond?
A Pocket for Corduroy by Don Freeman: Corduroy, a lovable stuffed bear, gets lost. After an all-night adventure he is rescued by his owner.
There’s Something in My Attic by Mercer Mayer: A brave little girl captures a ngihtmare to show her parents that there really is something in the attic.
If you are interested in signing with children, don’t miss ASL Nook! Featuring Deaf adults Sheena McFeely and Manny Johnson, and two absolutely adorable little girls named Shaylee and Ivy, each short ASL Nook video features a theme, from school signs to patriotic signs to animal signs. But instead of just the here’s-the-picture, here’s-the-sign approach that so many videos use, ASL Nook presents language in context, showing the adults and children interacting. Funny, entertaining, and completely accessible to both hearing and Deaf audiences, ASL Nook is a game-changer in the world of signing with children. You can subscribe to receive updates when new videos are posted, or you can catch the videos on the website, or you can follow ASL Nook on Facebook. But whatever you do, don’t miss out!
I am so pleased to share with you this article by my good friend, early childhood educator Louise Rollins of Maryland/DC Hands & Voices. Though this article specifically addresses techniques for using wordless picture books with deaf and hard of hearing children, these ideas will benefit hearing children as well. So if you thought wordless picture books couldn’t make for a satisfying storytime – think again! This article originally appeared in the Hands & Voices Communicator, Summer 2015, Volume XVIV, Issue 4 and is posted here with permission.
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When you search for books for your child, you can identify high-quality children’s books in part because they convey much of the story through the pictures. This is especially important for children who are learning language, as our deaf or hard of hearing children are, since they may not always understand the story through language alone. Wordless picture books are a category of books with very little or no text, where the story is conveyed entirely through the pictures. The same skills that children practice while reading books with text can apply: retelling, understanding story structure, taking multiple perspectives, and making predictions, inferences, and personal connections. Additionally, wordless picture books present unique benefits for deaf or hard of hearing children using any communication modality.
Wordless picture books are excellent for helping your child understand the sequence of events in the story. During book sharing with a traditional book, a child sees part of the story in the picture and perhaps understands part of the story through the text that is read to her, then has to piece together a narrative from those two fractured elements, filling in the blanks on her own as she is able. Using a wordless picture book, your child can understand the events through the picture first, then learn from you the language that describes what she sees. This process helps develop your child’s story comprehension and build her vocabulary.
Because the pictures may be open to some interpretation, wordless picture books create an interactive reading experience where you and your child can discuss what you think is happening in the story. You can encourage your child to take on the role of narrator; even if your child cannot read print yet he can “read” these books independently or to you. Storytelling opportunities help your child practice organizing his thoughts, including sufficient information for his audience, and selecting relevant details. In other words, while practicing reading, your child is also practicing important writing skills, without even picking up a pencil.
When you read wordless picture books, you can modify your storytelling to use single 
words or shorter phrases. You might want to do this if your child does not yet understand longer strings of connected language, or is still developing his attention span. If you are learning to sign, you do not have to feel bound by the print and feel pressure if you don’t know every sign in the text. If you are learning to cue, you do not have to worry about cueing long passages at one time. Instead, you can focus on telling the story and enjoying book sharing with your child.
What about older children?
Wordless picture books are not limited to simple stories aimed at younger children. You can find intricate and sophisticated stories appropriate for older children as well. The flexible nature of these books fosters creativity and reduces the pressure for your child to produce the “right” answer. If you have a reluctant reader who feels anxiety when presented with print, she may be more comfortable with a wordless picture book. Successfully interacting with a book can empower your child to see herself as a reader and engender a love of reading.
The genre of graphic novels has been rapidly expanding over recent years, creating more age-appropriate opportunities for older children and teens to enjoy wordless picture books. You will find graphic novels that range from little or no text to very print-heavy, but all are sure to convey the story clearly through pictures. An excellent graphic novel to check out is El Deafo by Cece Bell. Although it is text-heavy, it features a deaf main character and positive themes for deaf and hard of hearing readers, and has been well received by fans and critics.
Favorite wordless picture books
By Lita Judge:
By Suzy Lee:
By David Wiesner:
I had such a hard time paring down the list of my favorite wordless picture book titles or authors! For many more titles, click here and look for “wordless” in the book descriptions.
A final thought
Wordless picture books can provide you and your child with less pressure and more freedom to enjoy story time together. Please remember that you can try every single one of these suggestions with traditional books as well. Ignore the text, read the story in a way that matches your or your child’s language skills, make up your own story, let your child take a turn – whatever you do, make reading fun!
Louise Rollins has worked with deaf and hard of hearing children and their families in early intervention, school, and recreational settings in Maryland for thirteen years. She loves high-quality children’s literature and book-sharing with families.
Hands & Voices is a non-profit, parent-driven organization dedicated to supporting families of children who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Author Dawn Babb Prochovnic answers the question: “How do you physically hold a book and sign along with it?” with a series of links, videos, and more to help you put more signs in your stories! Check out the post at Dawn’s blog.
Hands and Hearts by Donna Jo Napoli. New York: Abrams, 2014.
I have long been familiar with Donna Jo Napoli’s fiction for young adults, especially her achingly beautiful Hush: An Irish Princess’ Tale and the fairy-tale retellings Beast, and Zel. But until I read the afterword of this picture book, I had no idea that Napoli is also a linguist and an activist supporting the language rights of Deaf children! You can find more about her linguistics work, including links to a really cool series of bilingual ASL/English ebooks she helped develop, here.
Back to the book at hand: on the surface, this is a simple, lyrical tale of mother and daughter spending a day at the beach, but every bit of it is built around the things their hands do: waving hello to the waves, digging in the sand, making a tent, and even being “Yak yak hands/yak yak fingers/telling as we run/out the gate down the path.” It’s a subtle reference to mother and child signing, and indeed, each page is accompanied by illustrations teaching a relevant sign such as RUN, WATER, or SUN. Amy Bates’ dreamy illustrations make this a sweet, gentle tale of family togetherness. A lovely addition to the ASL picture book canon.
Click on the covers above for previews of each story and purchase information.
ASL Tales proclaims itself to be “a new way of experiencing American Sign Language and English” and these engaging DVD/picture book sets truly deliver on that promise. Each DVD features a story told by a master ASL storyteller, incorporating illustrations from the accompanying picture book. Viewers can choose to engage with the story on many different levels – by watching the story in ASL only, in ASL alternating with the book illustrations, in ASL with voiceover and/or captions, or in multiple combinations of these options. Voiceover narration is available in 11 different languages – English, Cantonese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Mandarin, Spanish, Bosnian, French, and Portuguese – making this product an ideal learning tool for families from many different language backgrounds. The ASL storytelling itself is absolutely masterful, with native signers providing beautiful language modeling.
But where ASL Tales really stands out from the pack is its “ASL Clues” feature, which allows viewers to see each individual sentence of the story in slow motion, with relevant ASL grammatical features explained on the screen. These features include use of role shift, classifiers, nonmanual signals, directionality, and nuances of vocabulary – but you won’t see linguistic terms like these on the screen. Instead, you will find user-friendly explanations of the grammatical features that can be understood easily by all. The producers have pulled off quite a feat here – making big-picture language information accessible to a wide range of learners, while at the same time providing detailed, hands-on information about the nuances of the language that will aid even upper-level ASL and interpreting students.
This feature takes ASL Tales far beyond the typical list-of-vocabulary approach (though each DVD also features a useful video glossary of relevant signs) and helps viewers understand how to put sentences and stories together in ASL. The producers have created an incredibly flexible product that is both enjoyable and enlightening, one that can be enjoyed by hearing and deaf audiences alike, and one which manages to support written, spoken, and sign language development all at once. Bravo!
Stories by Hand with Kathy MacMillan 