Talking with your child each day is very important. The more children are communicated with the better communicators they will become. Young children need to hear lots of words so they can learn what they all mean and so they can start to use them themselves.

Top Tips

- Try and have some time each day to spend just talking with your child about their day or what they are doing. Playing with them is a good way to just have some time to spend talking with them.

- Try to eliminate distractions when you talk - turn off the TV/radio and put your phone down for a bit.

- Try different questions like 'Who did you play with today?' or 'What was the favourite thing you did today?' or 'Did you solve any problems today?'  - rather than just 'What did you do today?'

- Talk as you go about your day-to-day life, narrate what you are doing and use as many new words as possible. 

- Encourage your child to repeat new unfamiliar words, or challenge them to use the 'new word of the day' as they talk.

- If you are comfortable use nursery rhymes or songs as part of your daily routine - count the stairs as you walk up them or name each ingredient as you cook.

- Use car time, journeys or time when doing things like shopping to talk with your child - just talk about what you are doing, what you can see or ask them what they can see or think about different things- 'Shall we have tomato soup or chicken soup? Why did you choose that one?'

- Try to relax and just talk naturally with your child - the more you do it the easier it will be!

If you are worried at all about your child's speech development or pronunciation then please talk to us, we can refer to Speech Therapy if we feel it will be beneficial. All children develop at different rates but if you feel they are not talking and communicating as they should be it is better to mention to us. Family members and friends may often pick things up because parents/carers often get used to how children speak and so don't always hear mis-pronunciations.

The following websites have some useful information about communication: