How Signing with Your Baby Develops Language
Children generally love music, and respond really well to the intonation and pitch of nursery rhymes and songs. Learning words through songs can be easier than learning words through spoken language, because of their continuous repetition of words, predictability, patterns and rhythms.
As a song becomes familiar to a baby or toddler from hearing it over and over, they can start predicting the song’s patterns and what words that come next. This is when they begin to extract language from songs, and where your child can learn new vocabulary! Amazing!!
Songs and nursery rhymes also provide a great opportunity to add actions and gestures, which is hugely helpful for little ones to learn language and associate meanings to words.
Here are some tips when singing to your child, or when playing nursery rhymes.
● Add actions or gestures, or use hand-over-hand.
● Use songs as verbal routines.
● Choose nursery rhymes with lots of vowels such as “Old McDonald”, (”e-i-e-i-o”), or
“Row row row your boat”
● Practice being face-to-face with your child.
● Stress key-words (“Row row row your BOAT”)
● Encourage sentence completion.
Hannah O’Driscoll (MSc. CCC-SLP) is a speech and language therapist and early language expert. Hannah has spent most of her career working in early intervention, and has helped hundreds of parents help their children reach and exceed their language milestones.
Hannah has recently launched Daisy Plays, a platform of self-paced online courses for parents of babies and toddlers. The courses share simple, research-backed strategies, tools, tips, tricks and techniques to support and empower parents with professional knowledge that will make an impactful difference on their child’s communication abilities in those early years.
Hannah really believes all parents have the ability to create really meaningful interactions and language learning opportunities with their child when given the right support and direction. Her passion is driven by the ample amount of research suggesting that early language skills ensures better social, academic and literacy success, and reduces temper tantrums associated with the frustration of not being to express needs and wants.
Hannah is a mom, and knows how busy a parents day is. Therefore, her online courses focus solely on creating language learning opportunities and intentionally building a child’s communication skills through everyday routines and playtime!
