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Play and chat with your child often to help them learn new words. Use gesture or actions to teach new words. This can give children an extra clue about the word’s meaning. For example, if you are talking about a ‘huge’ elephant you could stretch your arms really wide. Share books.
In typical development: By 18 months, most children can understand the names of things around them, such as ‘ball’, ‘teddy’ and ‘mummy’, as well as other simple action words like ‘kiss’ and ‘sleep’. At 3 years, children start to understand more complicated words like ‘big’ and ‘little’.
- A Little More Conversation
- Reading Together
- Recasting Language
- Keeping It Fun
Talking to your child is great. Talking withyour child might just be even better. Genuine two-way conversation (dialogictalk, as it’s known) is related to children’s later language development, especially when children are very young. So asking a child a question or asking what they think about something, listening to their reply, and then respondi...
While talk is the foundation of a child’s growing vocabulary, books provide another crucial source of language learning. The language of books, even books aimed at the very youngest children, is different to spoken language, so reading widely and being read to is a wonderful source of new words and new patterns of language. Children will also come ...
A popular approach used in primary schools to help children learn new words or phrases is to recast children’s comments back to them, using a slightly different pattern of language. This might be to help them learn a quirk of grammar: Or to introduce them to a new word: This is a nice, easy way of modelling words for children without correcting the...
The last thing we want as parents is to be constantly correcting our children or giving them great big lists of words to learn. Learning to use language should be a joyful experience and, for most children, playing with words and language is a source of great fun. It is no coincidence that many jokes rely on a pun, such as our current household fav...
Children learn new words mainly by hearing them in a meaningful context (which often includes a story’s illustrations or a speaker’s gestures). Reading to and with children, and engaging them in conversations, are great ways to build their vocabularies.
- Expose your child to vocabulary words — talking, singing, listening!
- Have conversations. Talk to your children using a rich vocabulary. Explain words. Listen and respond to children’s dialogue with new words and related information.
- Provide experiences. Parents make new experiences (and familiar ones) rich with learning when pointing out new things and talking with kids. Introducing new words helps kids acquire vocabulary.
- Read aloud stories. Reading to children is one of the most beneficial activities you can do for their literacy skills. Find read aloud book lists for grades 1 to 8.
You and your child will see a health visitor at about 2 to 2-and-a-half years to talk about your child's development. If your child goes to nursery, they will also have a progress review with their key worker. If your child needs a little extra support, your health visitor and nursery can help.
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My four-year-old learned three new words recently: derecho, generator, and cicada. She is old enough and talks so much that I no longer notice every one of her new words like I did during...
