Encourage your child’s language with books

New words every day

From the first birthday your child’s vocabulary expands explosively. It learns about 50 new words in the first six months of the second year of life, from the 17th month it can be up to six new words a day. At this stage of language development, your child already understands the connections between words or sounds and events. It knows that a “Hatschi” goes with sneezing and a “pfff” with blowing. It also recognizes animals or other things in pictures. It signals this, for example, by pointing to the same picture over and over again and imitating sounds or words. An enthusiastic “moo” can be heard with every depiction of a cow. In addition, your child can already connect vowels and consonants to form individual words.

Talk to your child a lot

In order to support your child’s language development, it is particularly important to talk to your child a lot. Repeatedly explaining or naming things makes it easier for your child to learn new words and to see the connection between words and objects. The child slowly realizes how important language is in communicating himself and his needs. Therefore, the thirst for knowledge for new words is immense. It also tries out different intonations and, for example, raises its voice when it wants to formulate a question. Nevertheless, many statements are still very brief and kept in the style of a telegram: “Arm!” actually means: “Please take me on your arm.” As always, every child has its own pace of development. So please don’t worry if your child doesn’t speak much yet.

Exaggerated corrections only get in the way

During this time, your child makes its first melodic utterances and speaks words like “Mama” or “Dada”. Among the first words spoken are also many self-created or “mispronounced” words. “Julia” becomes “Luja” and the “elephant” becomes “Elantfanten”. A word like “crocodile” causes problems for many children because of the “K”s, so they often refer to it as “dododile”. However, these word creations or simplifications will soon be replaced by the correctly pronounced word, no need to worry here. On the contrary: the child shows joy in the language and this should not be taken from him by exaggerated correction. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should learn baby talk yourself. Because it is only by hearing the right words that the baby finally learns

Encourage speaking

It doesn’t matter whether your child’s development is fast or rather leisurely: You can naturally promote language development. The best way to help your child is to talk to them a lot. Asking questions, naming and explaining everyday things, singing, telling stories and reading aloud – all this makes language interesting for your baby and promotes its language development . It is also important at this age for your child to use a lot of new words to expand their vocabulary and to satisfy their need to learn and name new things.

Study in peace

It is important that you do not put any pressure on your child. Every child has their own pace and you should respect that. Support your child by responding to the interests he or she shows and by being willing to look at the cow and say “moo” ten times in a row. Even if the duck and “Quak” don’t arouse interest for the time being – don’t worry, your child will still want to get to know all the animals.

Read, listen and let the pictures do the talking

Books are excellent at this stage of development to support language development. The pictures in the books can be named and the appropriate sounds made for animals or vehicles. In this way, your child learns words and sounds by listening and repeating them, and the joint “journeys of discovery” also encourage their imagination.

Does your child already want to start reading? However, finding the right books to start with is not easy. Many things like font size, line spacing, and images play a role in this. So that you are well prepared as soon as your child starts learning to read, we have put together a list of the best first-reading books for you in this article .