Help your child develop their vocabulary
Vocabulary is simply language words. When we talk about a child’s vocabulary, we generally talk about the words they understand (called receptive vocabulary) and produce (called expressive vocabulary).
Your child’s vocabulary supports his or her ability to communicate their thoughts, feelings, perspectives and desires to others (adults and peers) as well as to facilitate their understanding of others’ perspectives and feelings. This communication capability enables them to build coordinated peer relationships Counseling and allows you, as parents, to understand them further and enhance your communication with them. Vocabulary is also important for learning to read and write at the end.
So how do you help your child develop their vocabulary?
Engaging children actively in the communication process helps them develop vocabulary. Simply talk together and listen as much.
To help your child develop their own vocabulary, you need to:
- Talk to your child often, about many different topics, especially about your child’s feeling about different things and what he thinks.
- Ask your child questions about their experiences (what was great and what was hard in your day?) And ask them what they think of different topics
- Read together (your child can also spend some time reading independently if they can). Provide them with books on different topics to expand their vocabulary (eg animals, science, fiction, people, etc.)
- When watching a TV show, talk to your child about what you notice about the show and ask them what they think
- Be sure to give your child time in discussions to ask questions and clarify their knowledge about the topic
- Consciously use the different vocabulary yourself when talking to your child
- Get a “new word of the day” every day and use it as much as possible with your child for the day
- When explaining the meaning of a new word to your child, give them an example of how to use the new word in relation to their / their lives (making it relevant to their world so they can better understand the meaning)
- Draw an example of the word at work and use it to help your child understand the meaning
- When your child uses a descriptive word for something, praise the great word and see if you can think of some other words that can be used to describe it.
Here are some good activities to encourage your child to participate in language development:
- Play phones
- Dolls
- Create stories together
- Dolls and other dramatic toys
- Tape recorders with microphones, or talk through wireless communication devices
- Interactive books and other multisensory experiences
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Here are some red flags to develop vocabulary between 3-5 years old:
- Your child doesn’t seem to understand much of what people are saying to them.
- Your child has difficulty following instructions (even when repeated several times)
- Your child cannot retell the stories, even when they are read to them several times.
- Your child overexposes unspecified words such as “thing”, “that”, “things.”
- Your child’s talk is full of “fillers” like “um”, “uh”, “you know.”
It seems that your child uses the wrong words in the sentence, for example “This dog (chicken) has laid an egg.”
If your child has difficulty understanding, or if he is talking to some of the features of the red flag listed, you may benefit from an assessment of his language skills by a speech pathologist. At The Psychology Hub, we have many speech and language pathologists who have considerable experience in these assessments and guidance interventions when needed.
