Let’s Talk

By Molly Brousseau

HTalking to your child doesn’t have to be a daunting task, opportunities to do so are endless. Bath time is a great time to talk to your child. While eating dinner as a family, model good language and conversation skills with other family members and engage them with open ended questions. If you have older toddlers, making dinner is one of my favorite times to engage them in learning. They are not only hearing new vocabulary words, but they are also learning sequencing words, and performing tasks that match their language.

it, they are not the most concise story tellers, but learning how to listen is just as important as speaking. When your child is telling you something, make sure you are on their level, looking at them directly, and asking follow up questions. This not only ensures your child knows you are really listening, but it is also an opportunity for more language development.

Good communication skills are more than just knowing key vocabulary. They help foster relationships, and express emotions and ideas. Beginning at infancy is key and if your child is anything like mine, they will grow up with A LOT to say!

Her Story

WOMEN’S HISTORY

The most obvious reason we want to talk to our children is the more words they hear, the more words they will use. Children’s brains are like sponges, even when we don’t think they are listening they are gaining and retaining key vocabulary words.

Although children hearing words spoken is important, just being exposed to speech isn’t enough to improve their early speech skills. More than just simple words, they need to learn how conversations work. First Steps Research shows us that “verbally engaging with babies—listening to their gurgles and coos and then responding, conversation-style—may speed up their language development more than simply talking at them or around them.”

One last and important step in teaching proper communication to our children is active listening. It’s much easier to tune out when our child is telling us something that happened to them in school today, let’s face

▸ Molly Brousseau is an educator with over 14 years of experience working with young children. She graduated from FIU with her bachelor’s in Elementary Education and has worked teaching children from preschool to elementary levels. She received her directors credential and also the National Administrators Certificate and has been directing preschool for the last five years. She is currently the director at Tiny Planet preschool where she has been since it opened four years ago.