Sign-Along Stories Series
Mimi and Jojo EAT, PLAY, and MORE, $29.95
Communicating through signs is a highly beneficial skill. Many parents recognize the benefits of teaching signs to their young children before they can learn to speak. Other people learn signs out of necessity because of hearing, speech, or cognitive disabilities. For everyone, learning signs is a way to foster inclusion for those who rely on signs to communicate.
This book features seven engaging stories that each emphasize three signs to aid in the acquisition of core sign language vocabulary, for caregivers and young children. The book includes visual images of signs based on the ASL signs commonly taught to babies and young children. It is spiral-bound in order to allow pages to lay flat so that hands can be used for signing instead of holding the book. It has a wrap-around cover thus giving the book a spine making it easy to find on the bookshelf.
To purchase Mimi and Jojo EAT, PLAY and MORE directly from Hand Full of Stories (recommended, especially if buying for an organization that supports people with disabilities, buying in bulk or wanting to support a charity through your purchase), please complete this form for discounted pricing.
Otherwise, the book can be purchased on Ebay
The Sign-Along Stories Series was inspired by the need to teach Reimy, a child with Down syndrome and Autism, sign language but with the realization that the existing materials to do that did not match our needs. Options available were limited to videos that went way too fast for Reimy to grasp (not to mention he wasn't interested in movies and we weren't too keen on him watching them before age 2) and books that showed vocab words but did nothing to really get them to stick in the brain. Our solution: stories that repeat the same words to help caregivers memorize signs, to give a variety of ways to use the word in daily life, and to allow caregivers to do an activity that is good for our young kids: read to them, thus increasing the words they hear in a day.
This book was inspired by the need for hearing parents to teach a hearing child with a cognitive and speech delay to communicate. The goal is to build Total Communication skills; not acquire ASL fluency.
This video shows how the book can be used to learn signs including it's lay-flat feature, color-coding and sign depictions