April is a month full of celebrations, remembrances, and honorable causes. But did you know that April is also National Frog Month? Yup, it’s a month for us to get excited about frogs. So that’s what we’re going to do. We like frogs here at Signing Time, and we love our own Hopkins the Frog! So we’re all set to celebrate National Frog Month, and we’d love for you to get to know Hopkins the Frog this month. Learning about frogs is fun Along with getting to know Hopkins, it’s a good idea to learn about frogs in general. Frogs are really quite fascinating, and your kids could have so much fun lea ..read more

April is Earth Month, which makes it a perfect time to teach our kids some fun facts about nature. We think a lot about conservation during Earth Month, and that is, of course, important. But part of conservation is knowing about nature. When we know how the natural world works, we can have a better understanding of how to preserve it. So where do we start? Let’s think about some fun ways to teach our kids about nature during Earth Month. Kids can really enjoy certain aspects of nature. And there are so many ways to help them enjoy nature. They especially relate to the living things in nature ..read more

Can you believe that April starts in a few days? While we’re all familiar with April Fool’s Day, did you know that the entire month has a national dedication to humor? How fitting that the first day of the month is all about humor too! We know our kids love to laugh, and hopefully we share that love of laughter. Thankfully, having a sense of humor is really good for all of us. So it’s totally worth it to view the world through a lens of humor. As we start, let’s look at the sign for laugh. Hopefully we will need this one this month. What do we mean when we say to view the world through a lens ..read more

March is National March into Literacy Month. If you’ve been around Signing Time for long, you know that we’re passionate about the benefits of signing, including improved success in both verbal and written literacy. And since it’s an official month to focus on literacy, let’s look at a few ways to “march into literacy” with My Signing Time. Kids who learn to sign… Have a better understanding of vocabulary When a child learns to sign at an early age, it brings an earlier understanding of using words to communicate. This early understanding continues to grow naturally as a child learns more word ..read more

Here we are at another holiday time! With St. Patrick’s Day this weekend, it’s a perfect time to work on some new ASL signs with your family. Holidays make it easy to focus on just a few new signs. And they help us to have plenty of opportunities to use those signs during a concentrated period of time. When we are able to use a sign regularly like this, we are much more likely to learn that sign permanently. So let’s learn a few new signs for St. Patrick’s Day! Basic signs to use for St. Patrick’s Day Of course, we should start by learning the sign for green.      You could als ..read more

So it turns out that the month of March is International Ideas Month. What a great topic to explore with our kids! Children tend to be full of ideas, but they aren’t always given the chance to take off with those ideas. So let’s challenge ourselves to be noticing and to be celebrating our kids’ ideas. Here are some areas where we can welcome our children’s ideas and help them to implement them. Projects Our kids are full of ideas for projects. They love to build and design and create everything. So let’s think about ways that we can support these projects. Do you have an art loving kid who thi ..read more

The slower pace of winter is coming to an end. As we head into the month of March, we can feel life get busier with the coming of spring. From longer daylight hours to the discomfort of our “spring ahead” weekend (coming very soon), March brings an increase in parenting chaos. And so, this is a good time to think about the practice of mindful parenting in March. When our lives get busier and schedules change, we parents definitely feel the pressure. So as we move forward into springtime and its increased activity or changes, here are three ways to practice mindful parenting in March. Keep your ..read more

We don’t like to think about bullying, and we certainly don’t want to think of our little ones as being capable of bullying. Yet, rather than decreasing over the years, bullying has increased in our society, and so has its drastic effects. Since International Stand Up to Bullies Day is coming up, we figured it’s worth looking at how to teach our kids to stand up to bullying and how to avoid being bullies themselves.    Why focus on this effort? It does seem that bullying tends to decrease as kids get older. But in the United States, one out of five kids between the ages of 12 an ..read more

It’s a New Year! The beginning of a New Year is a time that we all think about changes. As we consider what needs to change, we set new goals and resolutions, hoping that we can stick with these changes. And so, as we think about our own changes for this new year, let’s think about changes that we would like to help our kids make. Then, let’s look at how we can help our kids with these changes, and how that helps them learn to adapt to other changes they will face in their lives. We can use small changes now to help our kids learn to adapt to changes in their futures.    We can start ..read more

Here we are at the holiday season again! It seems that as a society, we are especially excited to jump into our holiday celebrations this year. And why not? We could all use a reason to celebrate and enjoy our days a little more. So as we head into another holiday season, let’s look at a few things we could add to make it a little more special for our families. And then let’s choose one as a focus for the holiday season.   It’s always fun to add a little extra during the holiday season. However, with all there is to choose from, it can become overwhelming or we can take on too much extra ..read more