Improving Your Child’s Language Skills
Language, like a sense of humor, is caught, not taught. You don’t directly teach your baby to speak. You fill her ears with the right sounds and your baby learns that talking is fun. Speaking is more natural that way. Here are some ways to foster language skills and development.
Play word games.
Word games teach baby that language is fun and stimulate baby’s developing memory. One of our favorites is:
Round and round the garden goes the teddy bear, (draw a circle around baby’s tummy with your finger)
One step, two steps, (walk your finger from his belly button to his neck)
Tickle you under there! (tickle baby under the chin)
Give cues.
Cue words are words of phrases that trigger a response from baby because of a pattern of sounds he has heard before. One of our favorites is the bump-heads game. When Matthew was in this stage of development, I, Dr. Bill, would say, “Bump heads!” and Matthew and I would gently bump foreheads. After repeating this game a number of times, Matthew took the cue and actually started moving his head toward mine as I said, “Bump,” even before I started moving toward him. What was going on in Mathew’s mind? I believe that he had stored this game in a series of “records” in his memory. Upon hearing the cue word “bump,” he dropped the needle into the right groove and set the whole record playing. Playing word games and watching your baby’s response to certain cue words lets you know how your baby’s memory (and language skills) are developing.
Associate words with objects.
During this stage, watch your baby begin to associate words with the most important objects in his environment. When reading to your baby, connect persons and objects in the book with those in his environment – saying, for example, “see cat” as you point toward the cat in the book.
Table talk.
Place baby at a table full of kids and adults and watch him join in the conversation. Notice how baby follows the discussion, turning his head from speaker to speaker and learning a valuable language art – listening. Listening is the first step in developing language skills.
Narrate your life together.
As you go about your day with baby, talk out loud about everything. Label every object, body part, and activity you do together. The constant input of words paired with experiences will imprint on the language skills centers in baby’s mind.