Welcome back to the series of the Whats and Hows. Today’s post will continue to focus on receptive language milestones and ways to stimulate the development of those milestones in your children.
The following is a continuation of the list of basic concepts in English that children should understand according to their age. Once again I will provide examples of how to model those concepts and how to check if your child understands those concepts. Just a quick reminder that the age gap indicates by when your child should understand the concepts. However, you should teach the concepts before/within that time frame and continue to use them throughout their lifetime.
When teaching comparative/superlative adjectives such as (big/tall, bigger/taller, biggest/tallest) you can use objects that are the same or different. At first it might be easier to have the objects look the same – have cars of different sizes and compare them by asking your child “Is this car bigger than this one? Which car is the biggest?” Then as they understand these terms you can use them in different ways – “Who is taller – mommy or daddy? What is longer – the table or the pencil?”
When talking about your daily events, use time concepts – “First we eat breakfast, then we will play. We went to see grandma yesterday, today we are going to see uncle bob.” Usually, they will teach your child the concept of a calendar at school (months and days of the week). I also suggest that you have a big calendar for your child at home and start each morning by talking about what day/month it is.
Pick a time of the day that is easiest to do the calendar activity (10minutes). Then go to the calendar and tell your child let’s see what day it is today, then using a sticker or a marker have them make some kind of mark on the calendar and say the day “Today is Monday,Tuesday, etc.” You can also ask what was yesterday or what will tomorrow be? You can also talk about the month/year and practice saying the date – “Today is Friday February 2nd 2018. Yesterday was Thursday February 1st 2018.” These are important skills your child should practice.
When asking your child to get ready for school you can say “First get dressed then brush your teeth, first get your backpack then put on your shoes” and see if they do it in the order you asked. If they don’t just remind them – what is first? See if they remember what you said to do first, if not, then repeat it. At first, you may need to support them to carry out the correct order of actions until they are able to do it independently.
You can target positional concepts in daily activities, building activities and in play.
You can practice modeling concepts first, middle, last in play by building a train set. First is the engine, in the middle is the passenger cart, and last is the caboose. Then in free play you can use animals with your train set. You can take your animals on a train ride by having your child put the animals in a specific cart – “Put the cows in the first train cart. Put the dogs in the middle train cart. Put the ducks in the last train cart.”
While making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, describe what you are doing and you can have your child imitate your actions. Then you can have them make it alone by following directions –“ we take a piece of bread, then we spread the peanut butter on it first, then we spread the jelly on another piece of bread, last we put them together. Look! The peanut butter and jelly are in the middle of the sandwich. What is in the middle of our sandwich?” You can also make a ham and cheese sandwich – “take a slice of bread, put lettuce on first, then ham, then cheese and last a tomato. The cheese is in the middle.” You can also ask questions – What did you put on first, what did you put in the middle, what did you put last?
You can use previous examples of activities and adapt them to use these different concepts.
I will concentrate on what I think is one of the most important language skills – sequencing.
We want our children to understand the order in which things are done. Talk about the sequence in which you do daily activities with your child. Have them be the teacher! They love to tell us what to do! If you want to know if they understand sequences then ask them to do things in a specific order and see if they can do it. If you also want to practice using expressive language then have your child tell you the order with which they are doing things.
Model language sequences in your daily life routines. While washing your hands and/or your kids hands, explain what you are doing. You can use the following sequence order and say “First, we turn on the faucet. Second, we put soap on our hands. Third, we scrub our hands together very well. After, we rinse the soap off with water, then we close the faucet/water. Last, we dry our hands with a towel. Now our hands are clean!”
You can also work on sequencing by asking questions. Ask your child questions about the order in which you or he/she completed an activity.
While making hot chocolate, talk about what you are doing it – “First, we put hot water/milk into our cup. Second, we open a packet of hot chocolate. Third, we pour it into the hot water/milk. Last, we stir it with a spoon. Our hot chocolate is now ready to drink!” Then ask your child – “What did we do first/second/third/last?” You can also ask your child “Can you tell me how we made this?” and see how much they are able to remember and if they use the words first, second, last.
At first, use simple activities that have a few steps/actions when having your child retell what they did. For instance, making quick snacks (popcorn, peanut butter sandwich), brushing teeth, making his/her bed, etc. If your child likes to draw and build things you can also ask them how they made it. If they don’t use the terms first, second, third then you can have them try to repeat it using those words by modeling.
I put the yellow blocks and blue blocks on top and red blocks on the side and put a big green block to hold it all. It’s a big house!
“Oh so, first, you put the yellow blocks. Second, you put the blue blocks on top of the yellow blocks. Third, you put the red blocks on the side and last you put the big green block to hold it together. Wow, that’s amazing! I love how you made your house. Thanks for telling me how you made it!”
This example demonstrates two techniques known as recast and expansion – you are reiterating what your child said but expanded upon their language with a correct model.
Here are a few of my favorite toy choices that you can use with children of preschool age (3-6) to work on the above receptive language skills. I also recommend wordless picture books to practice children telling stories. I also really like felt story boards because they allow your child to manipulate the pieces while telling a story.
The following list will provide you with an idea of the types of questions your child should be able to answer depending on their age. Once again this section has to do with the understanding of the question. Your child needs to be able to understand what the question is asking of them to be able to provide a correct answer. I will also give you some brief examples of ways you that you can practice answering questions at home.
Reading books is a great and easy activity that should be done everyday, if possible, with your child. You don’t need to read the words. You can just talk about the things you see and what is happening in the pictures. Point to the images and say what it is or what is happening – “Look! A boy. The boy is jumping. He is happy. Look! A sand castle. The boy and girl are making a sand castle.” Always point to what you are talking about. If your child is not talking yet then you can have them point to things to answer your questions. Once they point to the correct answer you can say “That’s right!” and then say the answer verbally and see if they can try to attempt to say the answer or part of it (e.g. apple or ah).
Incorporate questions into your daily routine and play. While playing you can ask absurd questions and make your child laugh.
You can incorporate answering questions naturally in any form of play. Let’s say you are playing with a farm set, you can hold the duck and say “Is this an elephant?” Your child will most likely say/nod no and laugh at the absurdity of you thinking that a duck might be an elephant. Then you can add to it by saying – “It’s not an elephant? Oh! What is it?” and see if your child can answer your question and tell you it is a duck. This allows you to work on answering two types of questions – yes/no questions and what’s this/that? Here are a few examples of yes/no questions that can be used in play – “Is this a train? Do you like to play ball? Do you want to blow bubbles?”
Choose moments in the day when you let your child make his or her own choices given two options. For instance, if they want a snack you can ask do you want an apple or crackers? During bath time you can have them pick which toy they will take into the bath tub with them – rubber duck or the frog. Usually I hold out both objects in front of the child – one in each hand. Then I ask “do you want the apple” and show the apple in my hand, then say “or the crackers” and show the crackers. Then I’d wait for a request such as pointing to the desired item, use of sign language, or verbal words “apples, crackers, gimme apple/crackers” depending on the child’s expressive language skills.
Once again, you can practice all of this in your daily routine and in play. Have your children engage in conversations about things they see every day either about books/toys or about what they watch. Kids nowadays have so much access to TV and the internet through tablets, computers, phones, etc. Since they are most likely going to have some screen time in their day/week, then we might as well turn it into a learning opportunity.
While your child is watching a video (on the TV, tablet, computer) you can pause the video and have a conversation about what happened and who the people are. Then you can resume the video. This works well with short videos such as their favorite cartoon episodes. For this example let’s use a looney tunes video – I know this is old! Nowadays its all peppa pig and paw patrol – but what I like about looney tunes is that they are usually very expressive and funny.
Now let’s say you are watching a tweety bird and Sylvester the cat video – you can pause it after a minute and ask “Where are they? Who is that? (point to the bird/cat as you ask), What is tweety doing? What is Sylvester doing?” You can ask 1-2 questions each time you pause the video so as to not frustrate your child. If you watch a 10 minute video I would pause about 5 times at most (2 minute intervals).
Before/after doing an activity (e.g. recipe, going out to a swim class/dance class, a play date, visiting grandma), have a conversation with your child and naturally ask a variety of who, what, where, when, why, how questions about the activity. Don’t make it feel like an interrogation but try to casually discuss the events that happen in your day to day life by asking questions.
Before swim class – “When do we go to swim class? I forgot. Oh yes, that’s right Tuesday nights. I am excited for you! I wonder what kind of swimming styles you will try today! What is your favorite way to swim? Why?”
On the way there you can forget where the swim class is – “Where do you go swimming? I forgot” – if child answers swimming pool you can remind him of the name of the pool.
After swim class – “How was swim class? I am glad you had so much fun! Who was at swim class tonight? Great!”
You can work on understanding object functions through the use of riddles and/or a scavenger hunt to see if your child can pair objects with their function. For instance, in a scavenger hunt you can ask your child to – find something that we use to brush our teeth, find something that we use to eat soup. As for riddles you can make up a quick list of object function riddles made up of objects your child uses often in their day. You can also add some new ones in there to teach them.
Here is an example of a list of riddles for object function:
After teaching object functions to your child in your day to day life you can question them about the use of things and encourage them to do the same.
Examples from previous age groups can also be adapted and used for these types of questions. For instance in pretend play you can ask – “When did/does the baby/tiger go to sleep? When do we change the baby’s diaper? When did/does the baby/elephant eat? When did/does the train(toy) leave? When did the bubble pop?” I also recommend using when and how many questions when discussing the book you are reading.
To work on answering “how many” questions, I like to give the child instructions on what materials we need for an activity and then ask them to get what we need.
Let’s say I’m making a craft with a child, I would say – “We need 3 pieces of paper, 1 glue stick, 1 pair of scissors, and 4 markers.” Then I’d have the child help me gather everything and I would pretend that I forgot what we need and ask “How many pieces of paper do we need?” I’d wait for the answer and see if they can remember. To make it easier I would break it down by saying one material (e.g. we need 1 glue stick) at a time and forget the amount (e.g. 1) by the time we reach the item (e.g. glue). If the child is able to remember several things at once (depending on their working memory skills), then I would say the entire list once and have them remind me how many of each thing we need as we gather our materials.
Information about communication milestones was referenced from Linguisystems – Guide to Communication Milestones 2012 Edition.
I apologize that I do not have communication milestone information for other languages. However, if you know the trajectory of communication milestones in your language, I am more than happy to give you some suggestions of activities to use to target those milestones with your child. Feel free to email me or leave me a comment!
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