by Reva Schafer, M.Ed.

1. Design opportunities for spontaneous language. Use your child's interests, toys, favourite songs/rhymes/finger plays.

2. Look expectantly at the child. Give eye contact, lean toward your child, raise your eyebrows, and pause.  Wait for a response. Reward the response.

3. Talk at physical eye level with each other. This promotes eye-to-eye contact.

4. Use exaggerated gestures and facial expressions. This not only grabs the child's attention but helps him/her focus on the important/relevant parts of the message and supports the meaning of the words.

5. Use exaggerated and varied volume, rate, intonation. This not only grabs the child's attention but also helps him/her to maintain interest/attention and learn to cope with and respond to the natural differences in language expression.

6. Use the child's language level. When you are communicating, remember your child's verbal level and adjust your vocabulary, sentence length and grammatical usage to ensure his/her understanding and yet, build on or practice a new concept/skill.

7. Talk about the present. Use what can be seen, touched and heard at the moment.  Match your words to your actions.

8. Comment on what your child is doing. This provides words for your child's internal dialogue.  An association is made between the act and the word.

9. Expand on what your child says. This can be used to add more information, lengthen sentences, increase vocabulary (adjectives, adverbs, etc.) replace vocabulary (synonyms, idioms, expressions), etc.

10. Provide immediate feedback and reinforcement. This not only encourages the child to continue but also indicates to the child that there is a cause/effect relationship here and demonstrates the importance of problem-solving behaviours (self-monitoring, self-evaluation and self-correction).

11. Be playful. Focus on associating communication with love, affection, humour and fun.

FUN ACTIVITIES FOR:
1. REQUESTS - OBJECTS - place objects out of reach or in sealed glass containers, move objects out of sight
ACTION - give a container that won't open, give an empty glass, stand at a closed door ("help", "give me", "want", "where", "open", "more", "stop");

2. COMMENTING/PROTESTING - put a hat on your foot, put out cereal without milk, put a book in the refrigerator, etc.;

3. GREETING - sing "bye-bye", call "Mommy", "Daddy", format/role play "Hello, how are you?" , "I am fine, how are you?";

4. VOCABULARY- visit the grocery store - classify words by section, describe, compare; visit the zoo - classify by section, describe, compare; visit the hardware store - describe by appearance, function/use; visit the restaurant - role- play at home to prepare, use formats such as "I want..." "May I please have...", "Please", "Thank you", etc.; use puzzles: "where", "what goes here/there", "why can't", etc.; find similarities/differences in pictures (use senses - look, feel, smell, hear, taste); synonym and association games (pictures, dominoes); story telling (leave out words or sections and let your child complete); barrier games (one person describes a picture to another who is unable to see it and that person must identify or draw it);

5. GRAMMAR - board games; use daily activities (dressing, bathing, dining); sequence daily activities;

6. CONVERSATION - use comics, make your own bubble drawings; use tennis match drawings to illustrate turn taking ("move the ball through the air back and forth); use toy telephones; provide a format/model; ask questions/request clarification ("what could you say?", "what could you ask me?", "who said that?", "what do you mean?", "ask me something else", "tell me more");

7. PROBLEM-SOLVING - us books; use T.V. programmes/videos; use board games; and ask questions ("why?", "what should we do?", "what will happen next?").

RESOURCES
Teach Me Language (Parentbooks)
Language Systems (1-800-PRO-IDEA)
Communication Skill Builders (1-800-866-4666)
Thinking Publications (1-800-225-GROW)