ASL Children’s songs are a powerful memorization and recall tool
Interactive children’s songs have been a key way for children to learn and remember core educational concepts. ASL children’s song support the learning of these concepts like their ABCs, numbers, rhymes, animals, and build lots of usable vocabulary. Think about the traditional ABC song. How many of us, when filing something, will sing the song in our head to see if K comes after or before J or to figure out the order of the letters. Think about another childhood song like The Itsy Bisty Spider and the actions learned when we were young that stay with us into adulthood.
Why? Why is singing a song or singing and moving to a song, such a powerful way to learn and remember things? It’s simple. Interactive children’s songs allows them to learn information in a variety of ways based on the theories of Howard Gardner. ASL children’s songs have children learning in multiple ways, all at the same time. ASL children’s songs have kids learning through:
- Physical learning(movement); ASL children’s songs allows words and concepts to be learned through finger and hand manipulation, arm and body movement and facial expression
- Verbal learning(speaking or listening): Children will learn lots of vocabulary by singing and saying words as they sing and sign ASL kid’s songs.
- Musical learning(music, rhythm, melody): Using sign language for ASL chidlren’s songs allows children to learn musically. Songs provide rhythms, rhymes and melodies used to support learning.
- Visual learning(seeing): Hand signs are visual by their nature and many of them are iconic (signs that look like what they are) allowing children to see the word they are signing.
ASL and children’s songs combine all these learning styles allowing children to learn words, letters, concepts, numbers and more in a variety of different places in their brain. This leads to stronger memorization and recall of what they have learned and improves reading readiness when young children enter school.
Watch our ABC Sign Song video to see how this ASL children’s song makes it easy to learn and remember the letters of the alphabet and how it helps separate L, M, N, O, P into separate letters.
ASL children’s songs are also a powerful way to teach basic phonics rules. Watch this ASL children’s song called I Love the Letters of the Alphabet Version 2. It teaches 1st letter sounds and reinforces this by teaching the ASL signs for words that begin with each letter of the alphabet.
Both these songs are powerful ways to support the learning of the ABC’s. You can add signs to other phonics lessons. We have a collection of songs that support the learning of 13 important phonics lessons. They are found in our book Signed Phonics.