How To Improve Your Childs Vocabulary

What is vocabulary? Vocabulary is a collection of words used by a child to convey a message. There are four types of Vocabulary, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing. Listening and speaking form the spoken vocabulary, while reading and writing make written vocabulary. The two types of vocabulary support each other. Children start by learning spoken vocabulary and gradually learn written vocabulary.

It is essential to understand why is vocabulary important? Vocabulary works as the base for learning any language. A strong vocabulary relates to ability of reading, understanding and comprehending. By the age of 3-7, however, children are reading to learn. For example, a child who is reading to learn about the World Map needs to know words like world, map, places(a basic vocabulary) to understand the Geography lesson. At the same time, the child will likely learn new words like country, continent continuing to build his/her vocabulary.

Your child’s vocabulary can be improved easily via day to day activities. It is important to ensure that such activities don’t get pushed in the day to day hustle. 

Also Read: Build Great Communication Skills In Your Child With These Activities

Following are the ways which will help you improve your child's vocabulary

• Read to them, read with them, expose them to books, reading materials, when they finish a book get their thoughts and feelings. Ask them questions related to the content they are reading. For example, if you’re showing him/her a picture of lion, talk more about lion, his roar and similar information. Engagement is very important in the process of learning.
• Talk to your child regularly, and make sure you are using all the words in the given context. Don’t refrain from using words you would use in normal conversations. For example, when you are cooking, show your child all ingredients and make him/her learn to call them out (like eggs, salt etc.). Non-verbal cues are also very important to boost learing and understanding. Always point to people and things as you name them, it helps your child to learn.
• Story-telling is a very powerful technique in boosting child’s learning. Make up stories with your child and encourage your child to make up stories. This will help you introduce you new words to your child. For example, if a child says, it was so small, you can introduce words like tiny, little etc. This stimulates language, thinking, creating and developing a sense of humour.
• There are assortment of games that can help you in improving child’s vocabulary in a fun way, such as : Pictionary(Draw and Guess), Charades(Use actions to communicate), 20 Objects(To test the memory collect 20 objects and ask about them), Categories(Popular categories include names, place, animal, thing; give an alphabet and let them fill the columns), Letter Scramble (Take the recent words learnt, scramble the alphabets and let the kid form the word)
• There are many books that you can refer to help your child improve his/her vocabulary, such as If You Were a Prefix by Marcie Aboff , The Boy Who Loved Words by Roni Schotter, Big Words for Little People by Jamie Lee Curtis, Word Collector by the great Peter H. Reynolds, Thesaurus Rex by Laya Steinberg, Beyond Baby Talk by Kenn Apel & Julie Masterson. Etc.

So don’t wait, get started now! Help your child in improving vocabulary.