Talking with Toddlers: How your book & song selection leads to learning language skills!
There’s a reason that every pediatric SLP is obsessed with books & songs: they are wonderful tools for teaching speech & language skills to littles! Fun, simple and engaging to most toddlers we come across, it’s a no brainer for SLP’s!
With so many books and songs out there, how do you know which ones to select in order to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to facilitating speech & language development? I’m not going to advertise any specific titles here. What I’m going to do is give you some helpful tips for using books and songs to expand upon their speech and language skills so that you know what to look for, and what to do, as you make your careful selections for your toddler.
Let’s start with songs. My son loves music and songs right now, he bops his head up and down when he hears music come on and it’s just the cutest thing ever. I also use them to encourage speech and language skills to develop by singing along and using some of these tips!
Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash
Song tip: Choose songs with repetitive patterns and simple phrases. No wonder why nursery rhymes have been around forever. By having a repetitive pattern, the song becomes predictable to your child. Thus, helping them to learn the song quicker and begin to participate in a verbal or nonverbal manner. Your toddler will know the outline of the song, if you will, as they will know the beginning, middle and end of the song due to its repetitive melody. Simple phrases help to keep the language demand low, especially at an age of acquiring so much language at such a rapid pace. Songs with simple phrases can easily be learned by your little one and they’ll be able to attempt some words or attempt the same number of words in the phrases.
Song tip: Sing along so your child gets that language model from you and don’t forget to make it fun! Making it fun means you’re smiling, being silly or animated, maybe using different voices or adding gestures to the song. Your child’s attention will improve if you’re making it fun to sing along and participate in songs together. Keeping your face the most interesting thing to watch will help your child direct their attention to your mouth, where they’ll get a great view of your speech production as you sing their favorite songs! Singing along in front of your child provides your child with an auditory model of language. You are using language as you sing each verse, and children typically learn new skills better with in person, or at least real-time interactive, modeling of the target skills (here, it’s speech and language skills). Watching a song video is not the exact same as you singing the song in person; or you could do both and have a song video on while you are in person singing along and making it an interactive experience.
Song tip: Find songs that have accompanying gestures to encourage participation from your child! Or you can make up your own gestures too, I’ve definitely done this a time or two within speech therapy sessions. Engaging your child with motor movements, simple gestures, or musical instruments is sure to be a fun way for your child to learn to love songs. Think of songs with multiple movements, or maybe just some hand clapping or foot stomping, you could even just shake a noisy item and pretend it’s an instrument. Adding this piece can target early joint attention and receptive language skills too (more on those terms in a future blog post) but to be brief, your child will need to pay attention to what you’re doing and try to copy or imitate your actions (that is a skill under joint attention) and they might even follow a simple direction when you tell them to clap or put their arms up during the song (that is a skill under receptive language).
Keep it fun, repetitive, simple and add some movement! Those tips should make songs a fun new routine for both of you!
Let’s move on to discuss books. BOOKS! I love them. When I was little I’d bring home as many books as I could from my public library, my mom had to designate a bag to be the “library bag” and I could only check out what could fit in the bag. I am now working on instilling that same love for books in my own child. He has quite the growing collection. The library has not yet been checked off our list but I’m hopeful that we will make it there this summer for the first time. So, choosing certain books can help with facilitating speech and language skills, but it’s important to know that exposure to any reading and/or book activities is wonderful for your child’s development overall.
Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash
Book tip: Similar to the song tip above, choosing books that are repetitive and predictable is important if you’re encouraging early language skills. A predictable text pattern lends itself to the child being able to begin filling in the blank as you read the book (after numerous exposures of course) because they start to learn the order and can predict what comes next. You can then start to leave off a final word, or give a long pause before the repetitive phrase is said, to see if your child attempts to fill in the blank. This encourages vocalizations, and maybe even some first words.
Book tip: Keep it simple when working on establishing early vocabulary with your child. Finding books with animal sounds, or environmental sounds (these are sounds like the ‘vroom’ of a car or the ‘whoosh’ of a kite), help facilitate some of the earliest words your child might say. Animal sounds count as first words too! As long as the child produces the same “word” for an object consistently, that’s definitely considered a word in their vocabulary (like always saying “baa” when they see a lamb). Even if the book doesn’t have much text on the pages, it might have illustrations that encourage these early environmental sounds if you can find some that incorporate “noisy” things like animals, vehicles, weather, etc.
Book tip: Read often to your child and incorporate into a routine for a certain part of your day. This might be fluid sometimes. For us, it used to be a part of the bedtime routine but honestly my child loves to look at books early in the day so now we read books more often in the mornings. At night, we might visit a couple of short books, but bath time has become the largest part of the bedtime routine these days. Whatever portion of the day you choose, try to bring those books out each day at a time that works for you. This will help to establish a book reading routine for you and your child. Maybe it’s just a few favorite books for a short time span, or maybe they keep bringing books over to you even after 20 minutes (hey, that’s a long time for a toddler!), any time spent reading to your child is helping to encourage their speech and language development. Be fun, be animated, and make it an enjoyable routine. You can even skip the text that’s there and just talk about the pictures! Or make up your own story! Or follow your child’s lead and see what they point to! You don’t have to read a book the same way every time and you don’t have to always read it word for word.
Photo by Alyssa Stevenson on Unsplash
After reading the tips above, can you now select books and songs with consideration for encouraging speech and language development? I think so! Ask yourself if the book or song in question encourages new sounds, has simple words/phrases, has a repetitive quality, is fun to read/sing, is easy for your young toddler to attend to…. if it checks these boxes then most likely it will be a great addition to your library as your child expands their speech and language skills.
I absolutely love using songs and books in therapy sessions when working with toddlers! It’s so important to incorporate things that the child loves and has fun with, helping to keep them engaged and encourage learning.
What songs and books are a part of your regular routine? Let me know your silliest song or your most beloved bedtime book, maybe I’ll add it to my son’s collection! I’d love to hear from you!
Kaitlyn Steele, MS, CCC-SLP