Things You'll Need:
- Variety of toys
- Books
- Recordings of baby songs, lullabies, and nursery rhymes
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Step 1
Begin by being careful to read your baby's cues. Most babies have distinct cries to indicate hunger and thirst, pain, fatigue, and boredom. When your baby cries, pay attention to the cry and try over time to predict what your baby wants. By properly interpreting your baby's cries you are teaching the baby that sounds have meaning.
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Step 2
Play with your baby often, using animated gestures and sounds. Use short phrases during baby routines, such as "Baby hungry?" "Up?" "Down?" "All done?" This will help your baby learn to imitate these words sooner.
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Step 3
In the car and when you are busy doing housework, play baby music for your baby. By playing the same recordings over and over, your baby will have time to begin to learn the words.
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Step 4
Read books to your baby. Start by looking at picture books together. Point to things and name them for your baby. Watch for what your baby is looking at and talk about those things, rather than trying to draw your baby's attention to what you want to talk about.
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Step 5
When you play with your baby, say a few words, and then pause and make eye contact with your baby, allowing her to verbalize or gesture, then respond to that gesture or sound. This teaches turn-taking, which is a conversational skill. Besides, you want to make sure that you give your baby time to get a word in edgewise!
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Step 6
Provide a wide variety of toys for your baby. By one year your baby should have board books with textures and simple backgrounds, stuffed animals or dolls, blocks, a xylophone, and peg puzzles.
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Step 7
Play blocks with your child. When we stack blocks to form towers, we use the same part of our brain that combines words to form phrases. Even if a child is perfectly silent during block play, he is actually developing the part of the brain that creates phrases and sentences!
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Step 8
A play farm is very good for stimulating babbling. When you play with the farm with your toddler, make the sounds for the animals. Walk the animals around. Pretend to feed the animals, (being sure to make lots of chewing and slurping noises). The sounds we assign to barnyard animals (moo moo etc.) are the building blocks of our language. By practicing making these sounds, children are actually practicing talking. Before your child is actually talking, emphasize the animal sounds. Do not worry about naming the animals. That will come later.
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Step 9
Make sure your child has frequent play dates with other children who are slightly ahead, developmentally. This social interaction helps to stimulate language development.
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Step 10
As your child begins to pick up spoken language, resist the urge to quiz them. Do not spend your day pointing at objects and asking, "What's this?" "What's that?" Children whose parents fall into this habit often wait for their parents to ask them to name something before they speak. Instead, speak in an open-ended way. Say things like, "That duck has soft feathers!" or "What a giant dinosaur on that shelf!" Then wait for your child to elaborate. If she doesn't elaborate, then ask an open ended follow up question like, "That duck is loud!"
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Step 11
If you find that your child is slow to begin speaking, do not hesitate to call your state's early intervention office. Most states provide free speech evaluations for all children from birth to three, and therapy for children who have a 33% delay. You do not usually need a doctor's prescription for an evaluation. Generally, a parent's concern is enough.
