A Word on Vocabulary Learning

A: It lays the foundation for language development, cognitive growth and social interaction.

A: As children learn words, they begin to understand and categorize the world around them, which is crucial for cognitive development.

A: It helps children to better communicate their needs and emotions with their caregivers, and supports them in learning about empathy and social cues.

A: Describe what you are doing. Label things that are meaningful to the task at hand. Talk about the actions that are happening. Plan for the next task together with your child. 

A: Nouns make up a very very small percentage of them. To help a child communicate effectively, we need to ensure they have a wide variety of words in their repertoire, i.e. noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection.

A: Receptive language skills. Before children are ready to use a new word, i.e. their expressive language ability, they need to first develop adequate understanding of that word, i.e. their receptive language ability.

A: While we want to make it a consistent habit to model new words to our child, we also need to make sure they have ample opportunities to speak with us and to practice using words, both old and new, in play and throughout the day. Children need many opportunities to hear words and to use them interactively in order to master them.

A: Choose words that are relevant to their everyday life. Very often, these would be words that your child hears frequently and enjoys using, e.g. those that are related to the daily routines and their interests.

A: A great teaching moment is whenever your child is engaged with you because getting your child’s attention is often the hardest part of the task.

A: You could do that, but if you have to redirect them to another activity in order to teach a word, you might lose their attention altogether.