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My son LOVED signing. By about 12 to 14 months he could learn a new sign in an afternoon. The most useful for us were: all done, more, eat, milk, water.

My kids knew tons of signs!!! I highly recommend the Signing Times DVDs - they are fun and catchy!

Please was a big one for us

@Mrs. Pickle: we use "more", "all done", "please" a lot. Thank you would be a good one too!

I started teaching her the basics, but then her speech developed pretty early so signs were only helpful for a few months.

Those are great ones and pretty easy. Help, please, and thank you are also good ones to add. You'd be surprised how quickly babies pick up on it. We started signing with DS when he was fairly young (started with "milk"), and as he got older, added more. By the time he was a year, he knew about 50 signs.

We are huge signers over here, even now that A and B are verbal. We started around 7/8 months with the basics - milk, more, all done. A caught on very quickly, but B wasn't very interested. We started attending signing story times which really peaked his interest. He started signing bubbles, trucks, trees, animal signs (birds, lions, dolphins, frogs, giraffe), then went back to more of the basics (please, thank you, help, all done, outside, and so on). Our signing instructor said some kids really get a kick out of signing the "fun" things instead of the useful ones. We learned to sign songs, a variety of fruits and vegetables, a ton of animals, family members and so on. It gave my kids a voice from very early on when they had little spoken language, and for a long time their sign vocabulary was more expansive than their spoken vocabulary. A hit a phase around 15-18 months where she would tantrum because we couldn't understand her spoken words, and being able to work through that frustration with signs was such a cool thing. We still sign all day every day - while reading, while eating meals, at the grocery store, and so on. I don't feel like it has inhibited their spoken language at all, and most of the time now they speak and sign simultaneously.

Our signing instructor had some "base rules" for early signing. I'm guessing different people have different ideas on this, but this is what we followed.
- consistency is key. Every time you go to provide R with milk (whether by nursing, bottles, sippy cups) show her the sign a couple times. It could take weeks at first for her to pick up on it, but only takes a couple seconds to do the sign each time.
- always speak and sign the word together.
- mimicking is the first step to being able to sign. Games like patty cake, itsy bitsy spider, or how big is baby all work toward your LO mimicking your motions - clapping, raising their hands up to say "so big!", etc. Ultimately those motions lead toward mimicking signs.
- our sign instructor is not a fan of "hand over hand" teaching where you force your LO's hands into the shapes. Instead you should model the sign with your hands and celebrate your LO's attempts even if it takes a while before their "signing" looks like your idea of the signs.
- She never recommends making your LO sign "milk" before you give them milk, for instance. Signing should be relaxed and fun, not stressful.

DS at 25 months still uses his sign for please and refuses to say the word. It was touch and go for a long time (he'd learn one, then another and stop using the first one) but worth it in the end because he's a late talker.

"More" was all I really stressed, and it ended up being the only one we "needed" before he started speaking. He signs "more" food, "More" of a book, "more" of an activity, "more" as he reaches for the door handle because he wants to go outside. Now that he's beginning to speak he says "please, yes, no," plus the names of particular foods he wants (he's 17 months old). I kept stressing "all done" initially, but he didn't really take to it. Of all the signs there are, I really love "more!"

My son only picked up 2 signs - "more" and "all done" and he didn't even really want to use them until like 14 months? He has been resistant to any other signs for some reason. He's 19 months and just starting to use a few words, so not a super verbal kid.