Baby Signing – does it delay speech?
This post may be a little controversial (and I welcome your feedback) but I really don’t agree with the concept of “baby signing” which has become very fashionable these days. This is for one reason only – I genuinely think it delays children’s speech development.
Years ago, when I first started Mini Ps, I spent a few minutes of each class on baby signing. After a while, I started to realise that the children who were most proficient in signing were often those who were least advanced in speaking. The crunch came when one of the Mums said to me that she’d much prefer me to be accelerating her child’s speech through vocal exercises than trying to teach her child alternative means of communication. I did some more research, compared it with my own experience and dropped it from the curriculum. Read more »
Hello – helping children develop good communication skills
If you read my blogs regularly, you’ll know that I like to talk about communication skills and how important it is that we make children confident communicators from an early age.
As you might expect, this is something that we are passionate about at Perform. In fact, the central section of each workshop is called Listen, Speak & Sing and we focus entirely on helping children with their listening and speaking skills through fun exercises where they learn to project their voices, use eye contact when they speak and be confident when talking whether to one person or to an audience. I sincerely believe that if you teach a child skills such as how to project and talk in front of an audience at the age of 4, they will retain these for life – it is quite simply all about practice and repetition. Read more »
Discovering your “fun” and “firm” voices
When we train our teachers for Perform classes, one of the sections we spend the longest time working on is their voices. I’m not talking about their singing voices here; they are, after all, trained actors and singers and wouldn’t get to the training stage if they didn’t have a great instrument. What we work on is teaching them how to effectively use their voice to inspire and control children.
At Perform, we encourage our teachers to have two different types of voices for effective teaching: their energised, fun and inspiring voice for the majority of the time; and a low and firm no nonsense voice to use to ensure control when necessary. Read more »
