Quick Tips

Playing copy-cat games helps your child to learn and get joy from imitating the things that you do. Imitation is such an important skill for speech and language development. It can start with body movements, progress to mouth movements, sounds, and eventually words. The more skilled your child becomes at focusing on your face and attempting to copy your mouth movements, the more likely her sounds are to be accurate.

Interactions with pets can be amazing learning and communication opportunities when they are carefully supervised by adults. Make sure the pet and child feel comfortable and start talking about what the animal is doing in the moment.

As your little guy or gal starts drinking other liquids, skip the sippy cup and go straight to having your child practice drinking from a straw cup! Prolonged use of sippy cups cause an immature swallow pattern, tooth decay, tongue thrust, and speech delay. Plus, now there are some spill proof straw cups out in the market, so you can take them on the go with you without worrying about the mess.

Get on the the floor and engage in some fun with your child. The closer your are to her level, the more she can see what you are doing and saying.

Prior to imitation of sounds comes imitation of faces, so have fun making silly faces and seeing if your little one will join in.

Learning is done best when it is multimodal with as many of the child's senses (sight, taste, touch, smell, sound) being activated.

Peek-a-boo is a fantastic game for babies to learn early on. It helps to teach them object permanence, social skills, gross motor skills, and most importantly...a great sense of humor!

What we tend to remember most as children are experiences that are extremely unique to the day-to-day routines. Have your child experience new things and be sure to talk about what is going on around him.

Books are one of the best learning tools out there. Even if your child isn't showing much interest in them yet, don't give up on showing him the magic of an entertaining story. Add funny sound effects, incorporate a toy, touch textures, remove pop-out pieces, open flaps, and/or flip to simple pictures. Soon enough, your child will be a little, independent "bookworm" and will be consuming books as happily as he does Cheerios!

We use gestures all of the time in our daily interactions, so start early with teaching your kiddo some of your favorites (high fives, fist bumps, wave, clap, etc.).

You may have bought the cutest learning toy and yet your child keeps going towards the door stopper. Instead of steering her towards what your want her to be interested in, make a game and add language to what you do with the door stopper instead.

Just like dancers rely on mirrors to practice watching their body in the space, so do babies. Mirrors can help them to not only see your mouth movements and actions more clearly, but they can also help children to monitor their own as well.