In our service, we provide support for children’s early communication and interaction skills, where they may not be accessing verbal language yet. This may look like providing strategies for you and your family to use, which can be embedded into your everyday life, to support your child’s developing communication skills. Such as:
- Modelling language without expectation of your child responding or copying. This way, they hear some great examples of language they could use but are under no pressure to respond.
- Having a child-led approach to play. This means that you engage with your child on their level, thinking about their interests and things that they find motivating, rather than trying to get them to engage with the things you would like them to. Play looks different to every child, sometimes it could be banging a spoon on a pot or building a tower with cushions and not just sitting reading a book.
- Following your child’s lead within play also helps to build connection as your child is interested and engaged making it easier for them to take in the language that you are modelling while having fun.
- Copying their use of early language, or babbling, or noises, or facial expressions, gestures or movements. This promotes shared enjoyment and interaction and acknowledges that this is their way of communicating once again building on that connection.
- Using Makaton or signs alongside your use of spoken language, to support learning new vocabulary.
- Using visuals to aid and support language development, such as objects, photos, symbol or communication boards that you often see in schools and nurseries. Or you could tailor this more to your child and print out pictures of things that they are interested in such as Sonic or Peppa Pig, or pictures of their family members or friends to engage with.
- Use silences within play too, allow your child time to process what has been said and if they are ready, they then have time to respond with their preferred method of communication such as gestures, facial expressions or vocalisations.