Being a good language model for your child means you have to listen carefully to not only what your child is saying, but how your child says it. If you feel like your child could improve the length of his/her sentence or speak with a better grammatical form, providing a verbal model is ALWAYS helpful.
Here are some simple functional tips on modeling techniques for building your child’s language skills:
Here are some simple functional tips on modeling techniques for building your child’s language skills:
- Imitation: Have your child imitate what you say.
- Correction: Repeat your child’s words stressing the corrected words in your version.
- Fill in the blank: Start a sentence or phrase and let your child finish it. For example: 1 cookie, 2 ____, 3 ____
- Expansion: Repeat your child’s word but add descriptive words. For example: “Dog” …the adult says “Yes, that’s a big dog.
- Extension: Add new or different information to what your child has said. For example: “I’m drinking juice…the adult says “Yes, that is apple juice. Did you know that apples grow on trees?”