8 Ways to Support Language Development at Home
1. Read together daily
Reading together is a great way to build your child’s vocabulary. Start young and have a reading routine integrated into the daily schedule. As your child grows read together, take turns to read books. Keep the reading animated and full of fun. Schools and nurseries in the UAE usually give you unlimited access to books, so benefit from this!
2. Teach through Music
Play songs, rhymes and sing along regularly. Learning through music is a memorable and fun way to increase their vocabulary and also learn new /native languages.
3. Practice serve & return
Like two people playing a game of tennis, serve and return involves reciprocal back-and-forth interactions. For example: Your child points out the window to a dog. You respond enthusiastically, “Yes, that’s a dog.” Your child claps her hands excitedly and you nod and smile again. “You like that dog, don’t you.” The practice of serve and return has shown to increase language and cognitive development.
4. Use Baby Signs
Teach your baby basic signs, such as the signs for mommy, daddy, more, up, or done.
5. Use Parantese
Parentese is an exaggerated way of speaking with infants to capture the infant’s attention. It uses simple language with a combination of higher pitch and slower tempo speech. This is different from “baby talk,” the nonsense words and silly sounds that adults often make to babies.
6. Pretend Play
Pretend play is a great way to engage your child at home while working on their language development. So, whether they are a pizza maker, doctor, fireperson, baker or ice-cream shopkeeper, try a variety of pretend play and use this time to educated while bonding over play.
7. Use hands-on activities and limited screen for language development.
Language development can be hampered with prolonged screen exposure, so if possible, try and use hands-on activities, games and toys that focus on language development. Toddle offers arrange of hands-on language developmental resources and also personalised language development kits. Speak to us and we would be happy to help!
8. Reinforce School Learning
Talk with your child’s teacher to learn about the experiences happening at the nursery and school. Read the books your child is reading at school home or sing the same songs. These at-home activities reinforce the learning occurring at school.
