Whether your toddler is just starting to put their words together or your child is starting to get into the world of education and you want to help them excel, there’s a lot that you can do as a parent to help improve their language skills. Here, we’re going to look at a series of lessons, tips, and skills that you should implement when you’re with your child, whether you’re providing more formal lessons, reading with them, or simply in conversation and looking to help them improve those language skills.
Talk face to face with them
One of the best ways to ensure that your young child is learning the relationship between the words that they use and the concepts that the word describes spending time actively engaging with them at an early age about those words. This can start with gesturing to or with objects and using the words to refer to those objects. As they get to grasp the words describing objects, you can then move on to the adjectives that describe objects of the same type, helping them understand the contrast between them. Look at them in the face as you say the words, as they watch for your mouth as well as listen to your voice when trying to mimic you.
Speak often and in full sentences
You might think that you’re “getting on your toddler’s level” by talking to them with only basic nouns and action words. This is true if you’re directly trying to get them to learn a certain word but, beyond that, you should be helping them get an understanding of language at its fullest by speaking in complete sentences. Before they start to learn the rules of how sentences are constructed, children tend to learn the rules of language through intuition and mimicry, first and foremost. If they come up, wanting to show you something or request something, voice what they are demonstrating using full sentences and encourage them to do the same.
Read almost as much as you talk
There’s is never a time that’s too early to start reading to your child. In fact, one of the easiest ways to predict future success with language skills is to measure how much time a parent spends reading to and with their child. Aside from the fact that books help them grasp language more easily, children’s books can also be excellent mediums for all sorts of moral and logical lessons that can improve their overall development. Books can help children grasp concepts and problems that they might only have loose emotional relationships with before they get to grips with it through the lessons of the book.
Getting to grips with the alphabet
Before your child is able to start reading anything independently, they are going to need to understand what the letters they are looking at are and what their function is. Nowadays, a lot of children learn the alphabet as sounds, first, rather than learning the proper names for the letters, and there are plenty of parents who attest to the effectiveness of teaching them this way. Alphabet books are great ways to start learning each of the letters, but you should make sure that the letters are being demonstrated for their purposes, as well. For instance, you can start by having your child learn the letters for the most important names, such as their own and the names of family members. You can also expand by looking at letters of the day and learning about words that begin with that letter and sound.
Teaching them verbs
Nouns and adjectives tend to be some of the easier words to grasp since it’s always easy to point to an object and label it, with the labels becoming more sophisticated as your child gets older. Verbs describe hypothetical actions, meaning they can be harder to grasp. When they are younger, children understand doing words to describe what they are doing right now or want to do, then as they get older, around 3 and up, that’s when you start talking about past tense verbs. Some of the best ways to teach verbs are with verb charade games, which you can either do physically with your body or by drawing the actions that objects, people, and animals are performing.
Encourage your child to tell their own stories
Once they’re able to put the words together, your child is going to start understanding how sentences structured together can become stories. However, you can also help them learn that they, too, have the ability to turn words and sentences into stories. There are various ways you can teach storytelling and have them replicate or mimic you. This can include telling real and personal stories with concepts that they have a clear physical understanding of. You can also make a game of telling stories. One that can be a lot of fun is to give your child several concepts to tell a story about, one after another. Of course, you should let them give you concepts to tell a story about, as well, so they can mimic your use of creativity to connect words, sentences, and concepts.
Start playing with rhymes
How we use language goes beyond the definition and correct use of words. Learning about the relationships between different words can us develop our language skills in a variety of ways. For instance, teaching your child about the three stages of rhyming can help them retain information more effectively, get a better understanding of phonetics and how different words can sound the same, and can even make learning about language more fun. These stages, which you should learn to incorporate, include helping them hear rhymes through nursery rhymes, poems, and songs. The second is to help them recognize the rhymes, which they will do through more exposure. Once they have the concept of rhyming down, you can work with them to create rhymes, too.
Get into homonyms next
If they’re old enough to completely grapes and demonstrate an understanding of rhymes, next it’s time to play with what might seem like one of the trickier concepts in the English language: homonyms. Play with words that sound the same but mean different things. Teaching them two words that sound or even look the same, and then later asking them to describe the meaning of each can help them build an understanding of words that goes beyond just the phonetics and spelling. The most important skill to learn is how context changes the way that language is used and homonyms can be the perfect tool for doing just that.
Building their vocabulary
Of course, language is a wide and complex tool, with as many uses as there are combinations for different words. It’s important to help your child start broadening their vocabulary from a young age so that they are better able to express themselves and understand concepts that are explained to them. There are plenty of great word-a-day tools and activities that you can use to do just this. They will teach them the word, how to spell it, the meaning of the word, and how it is used.
Use word chains to develop sentences
Your child is going to naturally start using sentences as they piece together nouns, verbs, and adjectives. However, you can also help them build on this further by playing word chain games with them. Effectively, this game involves getting pieces of paper or cardboard with words that your child already knows, and chaining them together to create full sentences. You can introduce adverbs to them through these word chains as well. It also helps children build context around each of the words, helping them understand the relationships between different concepts, such as how a dog might be soft, playful, happy, small, and so on. You can keep score to incentivize them to think of more words, giving them a point every time they create a new word chain that works.
Describe what you’re playing while you’re playing
Storytelling is one kind of game that can help your child start to grasp the meanings of different words and how words convey abstract concepts. However, it’s far from the only form of play that can help with their language development. There are lots of ways to play that help them start building their ability to use language to understand and describe the world that they live in. Baking is great for learning language skills because you can describe the process of doing it, just as you can with gardening, dressing up, or any kind of play that involves interacting with objects and the environment around them.
Keep in mind that how effective the tips above are will vary largely on the current reading, speaking, and writing levels of your child. Get a good grasp of where their language skills are and make use of the tips that are best suited to help them.
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