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Parent Strategies for Promoting Preschoolers Expressive Language

 

Parents of preschool-age children often seek ways to enhance their child's oral language skills. Following is a list of ways that you can stimulate your preschooler's expressive language daily:

 

  • Use "self-talk" or talk about what you are doing throughout your day. Narrate your own activities so your child can hear your language connected to what you are doing.
  • Also talk about what your child is doing while he/she is doing it. This allows your child to hear the vocabulary and form to describe his/her own activities and experiences.
  • Expand your child's utterances by rephrasing the utterance they make into a longer, more advanced language structure with more information and/or vocabulary.
  • Encourage your child to expand his/her own utterances by interjecting a word such as "and", "because", "then", or "so" to suggest they continue their idea with an additional phrase or sentence.
  • Model a variety of language structures and vocabulary. Avoid using "baby talk" with your child.
  • Casually restate your child's utterance with corrected grammar. Ex.: Child: Her swimming. Parent: Oh, yes, she is swimming. Don't make fun of your child's mistakes or mimic their incorrect utterances.
  • Allow your child enough time to talk without interruptions. It may take your child a little longer to express their message verbally than a more experienced speaker.
  • Encourage your child to speak in naturally-occurring situations, not by placing demands on him or her to "perform" in front of others.
  • Allow your child opportunities to take the lead and make choices. Follow their lead and support their attempts to communicate about what interests them.
  • Follow your child's lead to talk about what they are observing or doing or what interests them. They will have more to say about topics that are important to them at that moment. Focus on the here and now!
  • Prompt your child to talk more by saying things such as "Tell me more about that." or "Is that right?", "That is interesting!", etc.
  • Use non-verbal communication such as eye contact, facial expressions and gestures to indicate your interest and encourage your child to continue talking.
  • Sing and repeat songs, nursery rhymes and fingerplays often. Use lots of vocal expression and body movement. Your child will join in with more and more language as repetition helps them learn the words and structures of the songs or rhymes.
  • Give your child opportunities to use their language in natural situations with others to communicate their wants or needs. For example, when at a restaurant, encourage your child to relate their order to the wait staff instead of having you do all the talking for them.
  • Read together daily!! Let your child choose books that interest them; repetition of favorites is a good vehicle for learning language patterns and vocabulary! Also have times when you get to choose and introduce new and different books. Encourage your child to join in as you read and even read  to you as he or she learns their favorite stories.

 

 

Best Strategies to Stimulate Your 3-Year-Old's Language Development

By Sherry Artemenko

 

Your three-year-old is a delightful conversational companion,asking about their world and telling you about their experiences. Here are somestrategies to encourage language development in your three-year-old:

 

  1. Be a daily play partner with your child. It will give her an opportunity to practice her conversationalskills (taking turns), discussing her daily activities, and asking questions togather more information. This undivided attention with pauses for her to continue the conversation, boost her emotional well being also.
  2. Make time to play one-on-one. If a new baby arrives, the time alone with your toddler can "fill her emotional tank" and alleviate some of the feelings she might have of competing forMommy's time.
  3. Keep the play times fun, enriching and natural. Don't turn them into teaching sessions. Many children this age are starting to name colors, shapes and numbers. If you drill these concepts they will be uninteresting to your child, or he will only know them by rote, and will be unable to understand them in the context of play and language. Remember, language is learned through experience. For example, talk about the tall blue tower and the red boat going under 2 bridges!
  4. Follow her conversations that arise naturally. As with play, follow your child's lead in play and conversation. Don't force her to "finish" a play scheme if she has moved on to another idea.
  5. Have conversations with your child about what she has been doing, but now, in addition to the details, talk about"why" things happened, and her feelings about the event. This is anopportunity to use lots of new words and explain them in the context of an event such as "disappointed", "grumpy", "mad" or"sad".
  6. Continue to use new, longer, more complex words in many contexts. "The hermit crab is leaving his shell. The hermit crab grew too big for his home. The hermit crab eats off the floor of the ocean."
  7. Sometimes her words get jumbled when she is trying to explain something complicated for her . Affirm her with "yes" and then re-order her sentence correctly. For example, a little girl was playing with a car and play figures and she said, "The car sit and go" when she meant, "The Daddy sits and the car goes!"As your child's language progresses, sometimes their mind thinks faster than they can talk!
  8. Expand on her conversations. If she says,"I rode the airplane" you could add, "Yes, you rode the airplane with Daddy at Rye Playland last night!" Often this will encourage her to add some details too.
  9. Take advantage of book time. In Jim Treslease's well known book, The Read-Aloud Handbook, he says that a 3-year-old hears three times the rare words in books as she hears in conversation. This is a rich area for learning language and expanding vocabulary, grammar, and learning about new subjects. Emphasize rhyming words and select books that emphasize them such as Sheep in a Jeep and Sheep on a Ship by Nancy Shaw. Repeat the rhyming words and let your child hear that they have the same endings. Hearing that words are made up of different sounds, is a precursor to reading. Select some books that repeat a word in larger print and point out the word as you read it. Squeaky Clean by Simon Puttock repeats NO, PLOP, and EEK. Continue to choose books with rich stories such as Swimmy by Leo Lionni or Sheila Rae, The Brave by Kevin Henkes. Talk about feelings, why? and what might come next.

 

 

 

 Sources: 

(http://preschoolspeech.com/wp/?p=47)

(http://www.parents-choice.org/article.cfm?art_id=334&the_page=article)