How to Support Your Child

There are lots of things you can do to encourage your child at this stage:

• Have a special time to talk about the day. Talking about what has happened that day will help their memory skills. It will also help them to talk about things they cannot see and things that happened in the past.
• Wherever possible, use pictures, objects, puppets, acting, gestures and facial expressions. This will keep your child’s interest.
• Talk about or play games involving opposites like 'on and off' or 'big and little'.
• Join your child in pretend play. Let them take the lead. This will help their language and creativity. Talk about what they are saying and doing rather than asking lots of questions. This helps their language skills and shows you are listening and interested.
• Reversing roles can be great fun for your child. Let them be the 'mummy' or the 'teacher'. This helps them to talk about new situations.
• Play with and talk about sequences of coloured bricks or shapes, numbers and days of the week.

Giselle and Veronica explain they support their children's speech and language development in this video from I CAN: