• 1. Encourage your child to talk about their day. Speak in a natural way; try to avoid "baby-talk."

    2. Listen carefully and expand your child's utterances by using grammatically correct, detailed sentences.

    3. Read to your child. Talk about the pictures and what was read. Ask wh-questions (who, what, where, when, why, how) about the story. Have your child retell the story or make up a new ending. Also read such things as road signs, cereal boxes, recipes and labels.

    4. Play games together (e.g. Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Guess Who, Memory, Go fish, Simon Says, I spy, puzzles). Have fun!

    5. Help your child learn to follow directions by doing chores together. (e.g. setting the table, doing the laundry, cleaning up toys, following a recipe). Also, ask them to follow an unusual (“silly”) direction and then have your child develop a direction for you.

    6. Teach your child to sort objects by color, size, function, or other attributes. Talk about how the objects are the same and how they are different.

    7. Talk about experiences you share (e.g. day trips, vacations). Emphasize the sequence of events that took place. Discuss what happened first, next and last.  

    8. Model and encourage correct productions of target sounds in words. Also, look for words containing their target sounds while reading or when out together (e.g. in the car or grocery store).

    9. Use your imagination to tell stories together.

    10. Draw/color pictures. Encourage the use of multiple colors and objects to be of the appropriate size/shape.