Early Years Matters

For everything that matters in early years

Helping Your Child with Communication, Language and Literacy

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  • Talk to your child about what you are both doing – e.g. ‘we’re washing the dishes, aren’t we?’
  • Give your child plenty of time to think about what they want to say back to you.
  • Listen to what your child has to say and reply, sensitively helping them to hear how to pronounce any difficult words (but don’t labour this).
  • Read stories to your child.
  • Read rhymes to and with your child.
  • Help your child to remember some rhymes.
  • Make up nonsense versions of rhymes with your child.
  • Read out things that your child asks about – such as the words in a birthday card.
  • Let your child see you reading things such as a newspaper, or a recipe and talk to them about what you are doing.
  • Talk about what you have read or are reading – ‘I’m reading a text from grandma. She says she wonders if we want her to get us anything from the shop’.
  • Play games that help your child to listen to sounds around them by taking turns to ask and answer questions such as: ‘What’s that noise?’
  • Play games that help your child to make out differences between sounds that you and they can make using items from your home such as sealed plastic bottles filled with gravel, water or barley.
  • Play guessing the sound games – ‘I hear with my little ear something that sounds like this … What can it be?’ (Make a noise with items hidden from view such as tapping two spoons together).
  • Find items that begin with one sound and add another word beginning with the same sound– such as slippery soap, funny face, mushy mousse.
  • Help build your child’s vocabulary by playing with words – for example ‘yes it is big, huge, massive, enormous,’ or ‘yes it is small, tiny, weeny, little, minute.’
  • Accentuate the positive by repeating and building on your child’s growing vocabulary – ‘yes it is ‘complicated’ to put on your shoe over your slipper sock!’ or ‘wow you can play the drum loudly, can’t you?’
  • Answer your child’s questions when they ask about words, pictures, titles and symbols in books or magazines and if they ask you to write things talk to the about what you have written.
  • Talk about print you see around you – ‘this says ‘cereal’’ or ‘that DVD has 12 stories about a little pig called Poppy’.