How to support your child's development by creating a language rich environment

Here are some suggestions on how you can incorporate language playful into everyday life...

 Singing songs, saying nursery rhymes and trying out clapping games are easy and fun ways to expose toddlers to language. Activities like those can be played everywhere (during car rides, bath time or walks). Rhyming enhances phonological awareness, an essential skill for developing reading and writing abilities. Furthermore, it supports rhythm and expands vocabulary knowledge through repetition. Start with short Rhymes and choose some with movements like Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. 

Play offers opportunities for interactions and conversations. During those, toddlers learn how sounds, words and conversations work. Choose toys that suit the developmental stage of your child. You may also provide props to encourage pretend play scenarios where they can express their ideas. If necessary, help them with naming things they don't know yet. Use descriptive language when discussing certain items, and encourage your child to use specific words.

 Everyday situations like mealtimes, grocery shopping or bathtime provide great opportunities to engage in conversations. During those times, your child learns to take turns and practice speaking and listening skills. As children learn language by hearing, it is necessary to encourage back-and-forth communication by asking open-ended questions.

Listening games strengthens children’s auditory perception, which is crucial when they start school. Our children experience a lot of visual inputs these days. It is important to provide opportunities where the auditory perception is supported. 

Sound guessing game: Your child closes their eyes while you create various household noises (e.g. running tap water, closing a door. Ask them to identify the sources, maybe even in the correct sequence. This activity enhances auditory discrimination and memory, both critical skills for listening comprehension and crucial skills for learning to read and write. 

Most children love to help with grocery shopping. During your next grocery store visit, pause in one section and ask your child to bring two familiar items. Evaluate their ability to recall all items, varying the number and complexity based on age and developmental stage.

Demonstrate good listening skills yourself, observe their body language and respond warmly so a child learns to understand and manage their emotions. It also provides an opportunity to introduce a child to the language of emotions, so they have words to describe how they feel.

Reading together promotes language and literacy development. It is also a great way of bonding with your child. Choosing age-appropriate books is essential for keeping young children engaged as they might not have developed a longer attention span yet. Big picture books, soft books with sensory inputs, interactive books with flaps, pop-ups, sliders and repetitive language encourage curiosity and interaction. Predictable books encourage toddlers to anticipate what might happen and to memorise the plot.

 

How do I choose educational activities or toys for my toddler or preschooler?

It is crucial to consider, the interests, abilities and attention span of a child and to make sure that the activity/toy is developmentally appropriate and safe. Some children can stay focused on tasks they enjoy from an early age, while others need to move and find it harder to concentrate on certain tasks. Through observation, parents can get an idea about the current needs of their kids.

What fun activities are supporting my toddler's and preschooler's development?

From the age of two, toddlers can reach for objects, use one hand to obtain an object, throw objects, start building towers with a few blocks, and put small objects into small containers. They also play alongside others but not really with others. It is also the stage where they like to observe their environment.

If we consider language development between the ages of 2 and 3, children use 2-3 word sentences, they can follow a two-step direction, listen to short stories, name objects, and start asking questions such as 'Why...?' At that stage, most of them have not developed all sounds yet and might be harder to understand by people who don't know them well.

 

Activities and Games for 2-year-olds

→ Creating sounds such as an animal or a car sound or trying to make a sound while making a fish mouth. Children are not just practising sounds. They are also training muscles like their tongue and lip muscles, which will improve their pronunciation.

→ Grammar skills get defined, and children start using their first prepositions such as 'in', 'on', and 'under'. Try to integrate those playfully by, for example, asking them to put the wooden car under the bridge or to hide the helicopter in the suitcase.

→ Sensory play is important in many aspects of a child’s development. Therefore kids benefit from experiencing multisensory inputs. Touching different materials like wood, felt, and paper, touching and recognising different shapes, smelling flowers, herbs or other scents, and tasting different textures e.g. from various fruits.

→ Singing, rhyming and storytelling are great ways to develop speech, language listening, comprehension and memory skills. Children experience new words and the repetition of words, they learn to listen, how to say words and how to practice volume and coordination if rhymes are combined with movements. Start with short ones and move the car in your suitcase while you sing.

For example:

Vroom-vroom, Zoom-zoom little car,

How I wonder, where you are?

Driving down the streets all day,

Stop, then go - you never stay.

Vroom-vroom! Zoom-zoom little car,

How I wonder where you are.

(tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star)

 

→Encouraging children to spot objects fosters their curiosity, enhances their visual discrimination and ignites their imagination, paving the way for storytelling and adventures.

→Counting and naming objects in the house

→Naming street signs during a walk or playing with your car playmat.

→ Give instructions and see if your child can follow those e.g. ‘The car drives through the car wash and then into the car park.’

From 36 months on, fine motor skills are further developed and children start using their hands and fingers, in a much more precise way. They like, for example, to dump objects out of a small container, play with building blocks and snip with scissors. Children are also able at that stage to isolate the index finger from the others when pointing.

 

Activities and Games for 3-year-olds

From the age of 3, toddlers can recognise familiar sounds, start to make up stories and draw and build with blocks.

 

Activity ideas for fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination

→Threading shapes is a great and fun activity with developmental benefits such as improving finger strength, the ability to use the left and right sides of the body simultaneously, problem-solving skills, focus and attention, recognising colours and shapes, visual memory and learning about sequences, quantity and numbers.

Take a piece of string/rope with a suitable thickness for threading the shapes. Ask your child to hold it with the non-dominant hand and then pick one shape with the dominant hand.

→ Sorting and stacking different shapes according to colour, size or shape

→ Create a village on your town playmat or around your car suitcase by making little paper or cardboard houses while practising cutting with safety scissors

→ Watch a town grow on your town playmat with building blocks that become houses and create towers and grocery stores around your playmat.

→ Make-up stories about what happens today in your town or what adventure the mermaid might experience?

→ Have you been able to park all the cars and have you let them run through the car wash before you drove them through the tunnel?

→ Have you let the helicopter fly?

 

Activity ideas for visual discrimination

Children develop visual discrimination skills by learning to pay attention to details to identify shape, colour, size and position. Visual discrimination is an essential skill when children start learning letters in school. This skill will help them, later in school, to recognise differences in the shape and orientation of a letter.

→ Shape matching can support language development by simply naming the shapes with your child and exploring those ocean creatures further by reading or inventing stories.

→ Create your colour hunt at home and search, for example, for the same colour as the octopus.

→ Have you been able to recognise and name the colours of the cars?

→ Have you found the cafe or the petrol station on the car playmat?

→ Are you able to find everything yellow on the ocean playmat?

 

Activity ideas for language development

→ Are you able to name the sea shapes from the Ocean lover suitcase? Do you know the colours?

→ Are you able to name the items on the car playmat?

→ Do you know what the dolphin or the turtle likes to eat?

→ Can you make up a funny story about the mermaid...or where the helicopter might fly to?

→ Can we borrow a book from the library about ocean creatures?

→Note: Between the ages 3 - 4, they can understand prepositions such as 'next to', 'behind', 'between' and 'in front'. Why not incorporate those during playtime?

 

Activities and Games for 4-year-olds

At the four-year mark, you have likely already seen your child’s growing cognitive abilities. 4-year-olds like to dress up, doing crafty things like glueing, counting games, and helping with cooking tasks. Kids this age begin to memorise the names of shapes and colours, start to understand the idea of counting, recognise a few written numbers, and some start writing letters (e.g. their first name). They are also able to recall parts of a story. Some fine motor skills are improving, so they can complete puzzles, use child-safe scissors, and hold pens and pencils correctly. New gross motor skills may include jumping on one leg, skipping, throwing and catching a ball, kicking a ball, climbing, and hopping while running.

Note: Between the ages of 3 -and 4, children start to interact with other children when playing, but there is not much cooperation going on just yet. From the age of 4, children are becoming interested in playing with others. They are curious about the activity itself but also about the other children.

 

Fun activities are...

→ Dressing up games like, for example, a mermaid, a fish or a police officer.

→ Doing crafty activities like glueing, painting, cutting and creating, for example, an ocean or a town.

→ Counting games such as counting all the shapes or how many cars could fit in the suitcase?

→ Memorise the names of shapes and colours.

→ Recognising the numbers on the three cars? Can you write them down?

→ Read a short book with your child and see if they can recall parts of the story.

→ Some fine motor skills are also improving, so they may be able to use child-safe scissors and hold pens and pencils correctly.

→New gross motor skills may include jumping on one leg, skipping, and hopping while running, which could be incorporated when imitating how a certain animal moves.

→ The sense of touch gives our brain information about different shapes, textures, temperature, etc. Identifying visual stimuli like shape recognition is a necessary pre-step for later being able, to recognise numbers and letters. Put approximately ten shapes (pairs of 20) underneath a playmat. Let your children reach with their hands for a shape. They can first explore the shapes with their hands before trying to identify them. Then look at it and try to find the same shape again, just by exploring all the shapes with your hands, what is underneath the mat. If your child doesn't mind, then why not encourage them to sort the shapes afterwards, blindfolded into pairs of two?

For smaller kids, you can make the game easier by letting them explore the shapes first visually and with their hands before you put them underneath the mat.

 

Activities and Games for 5-year-olds

Did you know that from the age of 5, a child possesses the ability to, comprehend time sequences, distinguishing between what occurred first, second, or third?

This, coupled with the capability to construct compound and complex sentences during communication, provides an opportunity, to engage in discussions about daily experiences.

Particularly during holidays or while travelling, children encounter numerous impressions. The ability to revisit these experiences through conversations with a caregiver is beneficial for a child, fostering not only language and speech development but also aiding in processing daily encounters. Such interactions also create valuable time for bonding.

 

→ Rhyming games

→ Phonic games like finding the pairing word

→ Listening games (Guessing certain noises in the house or in the forest? Creating certain household noises that have to be recognised.).

→ Play who can spot certain things (during a car ride, on a playmat, in a book,..)

→ Explore books and libraries

→ Treasure hunts (follow clues and find a treasure).

→ Fine motor skill activities could be, paper-folding, drawing, playdough, puzzles, weaving, etc.