Building Your Young Child's Vocabulary

The two best ways to build your young child’s vocabulary are through informal conversation and read-alouds. These methods effectively enrich your child’s vocabulary and don’t require any additional teaching time, since you’re automatically building his or her vocabulary skills in everyday situations.

Read-alouds

As you explore the world together through books, your child is introduced to a wide range of words that he or she may not have encountered before. When you get to an unfamiliar word in a story, read it aloud, rephrase it using familiar words, and then continue reading. For instance, let’s say you’re reading aloud from the “Two Lonely Birds” poem in the Lizard Lou book and you come across the word unexpected. Perhaps your child isn’t familiar with that word, so pause briefly and say, “Unexpected, that’s like a surprise,” and then continue on with the poem.

Don’t feel you need to stop and have a vocabulary lesson on the spot, however—keep the flow of the story going. You can always bring up the word again later, outside of story time (“Oh, my! That phone call from Aunt Martha was completely unexpected!”) in order to emphasize your child’s understanding of the word.

Informal conversation

When talking with your child, purposely bring up interesting words. Use a word like delicious in a conversation, then define the word in simple terms: “Delicious means that it tastes really good.” Then ask your child to think of an example. “What food do you think is delicious?”

Over the next few days, use the word delicious in natural conversation to reinforce the word and its meaning in your child’s mind. At breakfast, you might mention how delicious the blueberry muffins are, or, while reading a cookbook, you might say that “this recipe for chicken soup sounds delicious!”

You might even be pleasantly surprised to hear your child use the new word in later conversation: “Mommy! These graham crackers are delicious!”

This gentle, common-sense approach to expanding your child’s vocabulary will yield results! And because you’re building these lessons right into your everyday activities, your child’s vocabulary will increase easily and effectively.

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