As a parent, you want to do all you can to ensure your child meets all of their speech and language milestones. There are many strategies that can help promote communication skills in your child. These activities will not only be enjoyable for both of you, but they will also provide important opportunities for your child to practice and grow their language skills.
Below you will find various strategies for supporting your child’s language and play development at home.
Label and Repeat
Create a language-rich environment by labeling everything to help your child learn new words. Repetition and consistent exposure will increase his vocabulary.
- Items in the house, in the grocery store, toys, people, etc.
- Label what your child points to, what he is doing (e.g., open, push) and functional words (e.g., help, mine, eat, please, stop, go).
- Narrate your child’s actions (e.g., clapping, smiling )
- Repeat your child’s vocalizations and verbalizations, which also helps establish imitation – a skill that is crucial for language learning and expressive vocabulary development.
Narrate Daily Activities
Increase exposure to language by narrating daily activities.
- For example, when you are putting on shoes you can say, “put on shirt.”
- Bath time and mealtime are also great opportunities to narrate routines. For example, “It’s bath time!” “Turn water on.” “Splash splash splash.” “Time for dinner!”
- Try using 2 word utterances to provide your child with opportunities to use the language themselves.
Model and Expand
When your child produces one word utterances, you can model a two word phrase. For example:
- If your child requests juice, you can say, “more juice,” or “juice please.”
Communicative Temptations
A communicative temptation is when you manipulate a situation to encourage your child to communicate. They are effective in producing speech because they motivate children to express their wants and needs and create opportunities to communicate beyond requesting and protesting. They also give children the opportunity to be the initiator of communication, rather than a responder to questions or to requests to talk. Some activities can include:
- Opening a bottle of bubbles – Blow some with the wand, and then stop or close the bottle tightly and hand it to the child.
- Put a toy that makes noise in a clear plastic bag. Shake the bag and hold it up to the child.
- Create a play routine such as rolling a ball and then suddenly stop
- Offering parts of toys, puzzles, snacks and holding onto the rest until they request
- Putting objects your child wants just out of reach so they have to ask for it
Read with Your Child
Books/reading are wonderful resources for development of speech, language and early literacy skills. You can use all of the above strategies while reading books with your child!
- Label objects and actions and describe pictures in the book (e.g., he is jumping, baby is sleeping)
- Give your child short, simple directions like “touch the cat”
- Build a word or two onto your child’s utterances
- Waiting for your child to request a page turn
