How Can I Improve My Toddler’s Vocabulary?

Babies develop communication skills at an amazing speed during the first three years of their life. Improve your toddler's vocabulary by taking your child to the library, reading aloud to them, practicing rhymes, talking with your child and not overwhelming them by using too many words.

Babies develop communication skills at an amazing speed during the first three years of their life. As they grow, they start to express themselves using words and phrases. As an involved parent, you can support and guide them in language development and vocabulary building. Here are simple tips that can help improve your toddler’s vocabulary building.

Take your child to the local library: Visiting the library with your toddler is a great way to spark their interest in reading early in life. Just being around a place with so many books can go a long way in making your child comfortable with reading. Ask for the librarian’s help to find books that are designed to develop reading skills in toddlers such as stories with one-line sentences and pictures. Moreover, many libraries conduct fun activities that target your child’s language development.

Read aloud together: Apart from giving you bonding time with your child, reading aloud together with different intonations and voices can make learning engaging for your child. Choose books that are filled with a lot of pictures as per the context. While reading, you can ask your toddler to look at pictures and use words that describe things and actions in the picture.

Practice rhymes: Rhyming makes your kids remember new words while adding fun to learning activities. A lot of songs with rhyming words can help you. Singing those songs in front of your toddler while making use of expressions and gestures helps them easily register new words in their memory. If your child is older, they can gradually imitate your singing style and sing along with you.

Converse frequently with your child: Try to have frequent conversations with your child using various descriptive words. You can describe various foods such as succulent fruits, delicious pasta, crispy fries, mouth-watering cakes and many more like these. The more words your child hears daily, the more they are going to use them in their daily conversations.

Take a trip to nature: Nature is a wonderful teacher. What your child learns by looking at pictures, they will learn earlier when they see them practically. Children learn a lot out of curiosity when they go outside. Take them to a zoo or an amusement park. Show them all the animals while pointing to them with their names.

Let your child explore your surroundings and weather. When it snows or rains, you can take them outside and describe to them what it feels like and ask them to describe it, too. Ask them how it feels, smells, looks and sounds like.

Do not overwhelm them with too many words: If your child finds it difficult to remember all new words at once, stick to teaching them only one or two words per day initially. Once you find them using those words, praise them every time. This motivates them to learn and add more words to their vocabulary.