The Magic of Signing Songs
with Sally Rudnick and Nellie Edge
Limited to 35 teachers for a quality experience.
2023 Dates TBD
Enhance All Children’s Language and Literacy!
1. Signing songs helps build an active, joyful community of learners.
The children on the left are performing signed songs at a multicultural school assembly. The second photo shows kindergartners celebrating their beautiful songs in sign for families at an end-of-year celebration.
2. Children’s memory for the spelling sequence of words is dramatically improved through singing, signing, and fingerspelling.
Kinesthetically forming letters using fingerspelling improves recall, especially for English language learners and developmentally younger students. They become “experts” at fingerspelling their names and high-frequency “heart words.”
3. Sign Language provides a powerful bridge to comprehension between English and Spanish language learning.
After children have learned to sing and sign the language in their song, picture books, they can more easily read the words with comprehension. This boy is reading the Nellie Edge Read and Sing Book Yo Tengo Un Gato/ I Have a Cat Little Book.
5. Fingerspelling builds kinesthetic memory connections for letters and sounds and develops the small muscles necessary for writing. best!
Here children are signing the word “l-o-v-e.” Singing and fingerspelling the L-O-V-E Spells Love song supports learning to write “love” and the powerful message: I love you.
6. Using American Sign Language (ASL) makes class management easier.
Singing and fingerspelling help children instantly pay attention. They also learn to use and respond to nonverbal signs for common procedures: May I use the bathroom? I need some water. Kindergartners silently fingerspell as they walk down the hall. Image from ABC Phonics: Sing, Sign, and Read! by Nellie Edge.
7. Sign language builds meaning by creating internal images of language.
These children are signing “cat” by tracing the cat’s whiskers.
The image is from ABC Phonics: Sing, Sign, and Read! by Nellie Edge.
8. Fingerspelling helps children feel and sound through CVC words.
Children can feel rhyming in their hand even if they aren’t able to hear it. (c-a-t, r-a-t, h-a-t). This accelerates children’s mastery of the decoding and encoding process with CVC (Consonant Vowel Consonant) words.
9. Songs in sign create memorable parent performances.
Parents delight in seeing the confidence and enthusiasm for learning that children bring home. They love watching their children perform beautiful and meaningful language: The Pledge of Allegiance in American Sign Language (ASL). (See American Patriot CD.) For video clips of American Sign Language, see Video tab at NellieEdge.com.
10. Young children who learn sign language have a life-long advantage for expressive speech communication skills.
Research from Marilyn Daniels in Dancing with Words documents the power of teaching sign language to non-hearing impaired kindergarten children.
Additional Information
About Nellie Edge
For more than three decades, Nellie Edge has been teaching and inspiring kindergarten teachers around the globe. Her proven literacy strategies are grounded in evidence-based research. Teachers everywhere have seen higher student achievement and joyful, engaged learners when they’ve followed her proven practices and used her extensive resources.
Read more about Nellie Edge.
About Sally Rudnick
As a master teacher known for her dramatic and joyful teaching style and her beautiful use of American Sign Language, Sally Rudnick is uniquely qualified to teach this signing workshop! Sally grew up in a musical barbershop household. While attending her first Nellie Edge signing seminar, she quickly realized how powerful the combination of music and sign language could be in the classroom. She immediately began implementing this approach to accelerate language and literacy and create a natural bridge into the English language for the students she taught.
Sally has received many honors over 30 years of K-4 classroom experience. Most notably, you may have seen her on TV! Tracy Barry's "Eight Heroes" featured Sally for her outstanding teaching. Her engaging teaching style also led to her nomination for Disney Teacher of the Year.
Sally originally learned sign language because of a hearing loss. She says, "Thanks to Nellie and Diane's signing seminar, I realized my skills of sign language and lip reading were a gift that would open the door for me to teach again." Sally's creative teaching and willingness to share her gifts have inspired both Nellie Edge and Diane Larson's work in using sign language to enhance literacy for all children.
Give your students the gift of fingerspelling to build fine motor skills and literacy.
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Coming to TPT Spring of 2019:
How to Sign Favorite Children’s Songs and Make Class Management Easier
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