Vocabulary is Important to Work on with Your Child at Home

It is beneficial to develop your child’s vocabulary from an early age because children with strong vocabularies do better in school. There is a strong connection between vocabulary and reading comprehension. However, children will not learn vocabulary effectively by drilling words with flashcards. Plus, flashcards are boring.

Strategies to Develop Stronger Vocabulary

• Introduce only one word at a time and use it frequently. It may be helpful to choose a word that is of interest to your toddler, such as butterfly, or a word from the school curriculum for your elementary school aged child, such as merchant.  
• Describe the word by talking about its physical characteristics, where you might find it, or what you think about it. For example, while watching a butterfly, describe its color, how it moves and the plants on which it lands. For a word such as merchant, define the word and identify merchants in your community and reference them each time you shop. Provide multiple exposures to the word in many different settings for effective learning.
• Define the word. Have your child define the word using their own words. Help them keep the definition simple and easy to remember.
• Choose words from a variety of word categories. It is easy to focus on nouns (things), but also try to include verbs (actions), adjectives (describes a noun) and adverbs (modifies a verb or another adverb).
• Play word games. Fill down time with word games such as Twenty Questions. One person chooses a word and then all players take turns asking questions to figure out the word. Parents can choose newly learned words.
• Relate a new word to known words. Ask your child what other words go with the new word.  For butterfly, it could be insect, flower, flying, etc. For merchant it could be storekeeper, store, money, etc.
• Illustrate with pictures. Ask your child to draw a picture of the word. For an older child, practice spelling the word by having them write the word to go with the picture, or just spell the word out loud.
• Use the word. Encourage your child to also use the word several times in the day.
• Encourage interest in new words. Teach your child to recognize words that they have not heard before, and use the above strategies to make the identified word part of their vocabulary.
• Talk at dinnertime. Enriching conversation with adults not only exposes children to more words, it increases their world knowledge.
• Read to or with your child. Even older children benefit from shared reading, especially if reading is hard.

And don’t forget to keep up with your summer reading to prevent your child from losing skills they have already learned!