Language Building Tips!
Helping and encouraging a child to speak is always something very important and exciting for families. Parents are often looking for the best thing to buy or app to download. The reality is, the easiest and best way to support language development is in a child’s natural environment.
There is no need to buy new games, flashcards, or any special apps or gadgets. There are plenty of easy activities you can build into your regular routine with endless opportunties to build a child’s expressive and receptive language skills. The more you look around the more opportunties to talk about what you see, hear, smell, think, and wonder.
Receptive & Expressive Langauge
Receptive Language is how a child understands language.
Expressive Language is how a child uses language.
Receptive language typically develops first and remains larger than expressive language. A child’s expressive langauge relies on the receptive.
You can support receptive langauge development by talking about who, what, when, where, why, and how different things happen. Once a child becomes a bit older you can then support expressive langauge development by asking those same questions about all the things in their environment.
Build, Build, Build!
Children will make many, many errors while they are learning. Take these opportunities to rephrase, explain, expand on, and reinforce the new things your child is trying to say.
While you are supporting your child’s development consider the different parts of language. You can support vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, comprehension, critical thinking and memory. Remember to keep things fun! Make sure you child is paying attention, follow your child’s lead, give them plenty of time to think and respond, talk about the same thing more than once and try to connect new vocabulary and ideas to things your child experienced before.
Strong language skills will build confidence and benefit your child academically and socially for the rest of their lives.