Books are an excellent tool to help your child learn language and expand their vocabulary. No matter your child’s age or ability level they can participate with and enjoy listening to books. Here are some ideas to make learning with books more interactive and engaging for your child.
- Books with flaps can be fun to open. We can practice knocking on the door or saying the word “open” and naming what we discover is under the flap. Our YouTube channel has a fun video demonstrating how we can use books to imitate action sounds!
- Use books that have repetition such as “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see?” for verbal routines. Read part of the line and have them fill in one word, in this case, “see”.
- You can talk about the things in the pictures helping kids to label objects such as animals, colors, shapes, or letters.
- If your child enjoys listening to the story you can point to the words as you read to help them recognize letters have meanings. Learning to hold the book correctly and turn the page are all important early literacy skills.
- Use the colorful pictures to label or identify actions or pronouns and talking about what they see happening.
- We can use books to expand the vocabulary of children as well. They can start to learn new words from the books they read. Take a moment to help them work through the meaning of unfamiliar words and practice using them.
- If our child is working on articulation, they can find their sound in the book and practice saying it.
- Ask questions about the book as you are reading. Simple questions could include WH- questions like “What happened?” or “Who did that?”. More advanced questions could include inferencing “what do you think will happen next?” These are key questions to develop problem solving and identification.
Do you have concerns with your child’s speech development? T.E.A.M 4 Kids would love to help! Please call us at 1-800-376-3440 to schedule an evaluation.
Katherine Skornia, M.S. CCC-SLP