Best Toys to Help Toddlers Talk - Development Speech
Best Toys to Help Toddlers Talk - Development Speech
The joy of a parent is to witness their child as they continue to succeed in developmental milestones. These developments can include babbling, crawling, smiling, taking their first steps, echoing their first words, and beginning to try to string short sentences.
A parent can start to worry when their toddler takes longer to reach the developmental milestone centered on talking when experiencing speech delay.
When a child has attained an age centered on talking, a parent may not want their child to fall behind. But, you mustn’t worry a lot because some kids can expect to develop their talking earlier than others.
In this article, we will learn how you can help your baby talk, some baby talk milestones, and the importance of play for speech and language development to help your kid’s speech development.
Table of Contents
What is Baby Talk Milestones?
Usually, a baby’s first words will become memorable to a parent’s ears, but a parent may begin to worry when their child begins to fall from the tack in the speech and language development.
As much as every child does have their own pace, you can use the general milestones to guide a parent on anybody else to know about everyday speech and language development.
A baby’s talk milestones also help doctors and other medical practitioners concerned with baby’s to determine when your child will require extra help to help them or recommend the best speech-language pathologist. Here are the baby talk milestones to observe:
Baby Talk at 3 Months
When your baby has reached three months, they can listen to your voice very well watch you in the face when you speak to them. They can also turn their heads towards where a voice, music, or sound is coming.
Many infants prefer women’s voices to men’s. Strangely, many babies also enjoy voices and music they used to hear when they were still in their mother’s womb, at the end of three months after birth. A baby will start “cooing” to happy, monotonous sing-song vocalization.
The baby will also smile when you appear, cry differently for different needs and recognize someone they are used to their voice. Further, they will keep quiet or smile when you speak to them.
Baby Talk at 6 Months
They will start babbling with different sounds when your baby is six months old. For instance, your baby will start to say “ba-ba” or “dada”. it is unfair to mothers they never say “mama” after all the trouble they have gone with them.
By the end of 6-7 months, a baby will begin responding to their name when mentioned, recognizing their native language, and using a tone of voice to indicate when they are happy or upset.
It is an important thing to note that babbling at this age comes from random syllables and doesn’t have any real meaning or comprehension. Therefore, when you hear your child saying “dada” or mentioning words likes “daddy” don’t interpret them to mean anything.
A baby will also notice the sound of some toys, respond to changes from the tone of your voice, and pay attention when music plays.
Baby Talk at 9 Months
When your baby is heading toward the end of 9 months, they begin to understand a few essential words spoken to them like “bye-bye” and “no”, they will also begin to use many tones of voice and consonant sounds when expressing themselves.
Baby Talk at The End of 12 Months
After 12 months, your baby will begin to imitate different speech sounds, utter a few words like “dada”, “mama” and “uh-oh” which at this age they understand them, they will respond to standard instruction like “come here” and recognize words from particular items like “shoe”.
Baby Talk After 18 Months
At this age, a baby can utter several simple words and know how to point to people, body parts you instruct them to hone, and objects. They also learn to repeat sounds and words you often say to them, such as the last word in your sentence.
In most cases, you will notice that they leave the endings or the beginning of words when speaking. For example, a word like “dog” will be “daw” or “noodles” will be pronounced as “noo-noos”. A baby can say as many words as ten and recognize family members’ names.
Baby Talk After 24 Months
When your child has approached two years, they might begin to use simple phrases like “more milk” learns to ask two-word questions like “Go bye-bye?” “Me milk” A baby can also utter 50 plus words, begin to understand simple questions and follow simple commands.
Baby Talk at 3 Years
By the time your kid is clocking three years, their vocabulary needs to have expanded rapidly. They need to understand symbolic and abstract language such as “now”, spatial concepts such as “in” and feelings like “sad.”
How Can I Help My Toddler talk?
The best way to help your toddler learn to talk is by turning the daily activity they partake in into a learning experience. As your kid goes through their normal day-to-day activities, they can learn plenty of knowledge from every teaching opportunity you present them.
What you need to do as a parent is to be available and have a willing spirit to take them through that journey. Here are tips to help you learn how to teach your toddler to learn to talk.
Observe Your Kid's Action
Study every little effort your toddler is trying to make. For instance, your baby may be trying to reach both arms to you, indicating they want to be picked up, they may hand you their toy to show you their want to play, or when feeding them, push the plate away to show they don’t need any more food.
When you see this type of action, it is essential that you respond to them with a smile, make eye contact, and inspire these early nonverbal attempts the kid is making.
Imitate
If there is a voice that a baby knows and loves to hear is that of their parent. Therefore, when a parent speaks to their toddler, it helps them greatly in their speech development.
The more you encourage your baby with their baby talk using short and precise correct words; it promotes learning and keeps improving in their Talk.
Listen
Listening to your kid entails paying close attention to what your baby is babbling and cooing. After listening to them, you also need to coo and babble the same sounds back to your baby.
Your baby will continue to imitate the sound you will make as a parent. They will learn immensely from the pitch and tone coming from you to match and try to match the language spoken around them.
Narrate
When you are in the presence of your baby, try as much as possible to talk to them about the kind of activity you are doing, such as washing, feeding, dressing, and changing their diapers. Your baby will be observant and connect with the experiences and activities.
Elaborate
Supposing you notice your baby pointing at something and making noises. For instance, please don’t feed them more noodles when they are feeding. Instead, point to their food and say, “you want more of these? You may also add, “These noodles are tasty with cheese, don’t they?”
Play
Another critical way to help your toddler is by encouraging them to play, imagine things out loud and pretend. It will help them develop their verbal skills are learn to talk at the toddler’s stage.
When you sense there are speech and language delays to your kid, it’s advisable to visit a speech-language pathologist to treat the specific preach, voice, and language disorder causing speech delay to your child.
Why is PLAY For Speech and Language Development So Important?
The play has a massive impact on developing your child’s language skills. Some children will start talking from 6 months old, and by the time they reach two years, they will have mastered a wide range of vocabularies of single words.
They will also begin to create simple sentences to pass their feelings, needs, and thoughts. You will notice your kind around this time will be moving away from unsociable play to begin displaying social skills through parallel play and then move to cooperative play.
During unsociable play, your child focuses entirely on their sport and does not interact with others. This helps them develop listening skills and supports them in developing concentration and building their focus.
Therefore, they will become better listeners to what others say when they have conversations. They will also develop their communication skills by interacting with other kids without playing directly with them.
When a child begins to engage in cooperative play, they will enhance their communication and learn from their playmates.
Generally, play can enable your child to practice language skills that they have been learning and continue to build on their learned vocabularies. When they interact with adults and peers when playing, it helps them refine their speech sounds as they listen to others.
When playing, social interaction with others plays a vital factor in supporting a child’s language development. Children who were denied opportunities to interact with others in most cases have immature speech development. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that your kid does have opportunities to interact with others in play to build their social skills.
Best Toys to Help Toddlers Talk - Top picks of Speech Therapists!
Play encourages speech development when a kid has experienced language or speech delays.
Here you can find a variety of ways to help your toddler improve their Talk. You don’t need to buy new toys, but rather use these types of toys, these classic toys, to increase their language learning while being in interactive play with them:
When you get Mr. Potato Head for your kid, this toy ensures that your kid has endless opportunities to learn language stimulation. A toddler can learn so many tons of vocabulary and different language concepts: body parts, action words, following instructions etc.
This toy is an excellent activity to help a child improve in oral motor and mouth skills. When a child engages in blowing exercise, it helps them improve their tongue strength and produce sound properly. It also enhances lip rounding to have better consonant sound formation.
As to increasing child’s vocabulary – we can practice the words “open” (the bootle) “blow”, “pop”, “pull” (the wand) and then encouraging to say two words such as “blow bubbles”. This way we’re practicing pronouncing P (in “open”) and B (in “bubbles”).
his classic play toy has lights, music, sound, and intelligent stages for your kid to enjoy and have excellent learning words and sounds. This is a wonderful toy for making your toddler make the animal sounds like the “mooo” “Hi-Ha” etc.
This toy can improve a child’s speech to expand their level of mean length of utterances (MLU) while they are actively engaging in pretend play. When a child is at a single word level, this toy is great for developing two-word phrases when modeling.
Play Daugh is a fantastic tool to help toddlers develop manipulation and strength using their fingers. A kid will also learn a lot in shape recognition and letter formation. A parent can use this toy to prepare their kid to learn how to form the letter of their names by using action words and also putting 2 words together.
Toys with wheels are essential to help develop the child’s vocabulary. When your child becomes interested in your play idea, you can enter their world and engage with what you see and hear. A child will learn to imitate basic speech sounds and many wonderful words while playing with these great toys: colors, action words, directions etc.
This classic toy is another fun way to interact with your child and practice speech therapy. They can help a child know how to express themselves learn a receptive language and become better in articulation and social skills.
A tea set is a great toy for your kid to help them learn new words and increase their vocabulary skills. It encourages your child’s imagination and can foster their dialogue and interaction.
A baby doll is a great way to help a child to open up and begin to expand their pretend play. While playing with the beauty, a child will have many opportunities to practice their language skills and speech: body parts, possessiveness and pronouns, clothing items, and more.
Nursery Rhymes: 1. Patty Cake 2. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star 3. If you’re Happy and You Know It 4. Itsy Bitsy Spider 5. Old MacDonald 6. A-Tisket, A-Tasket
Cali’s book rhythm books are the best to aid your child in improving their learning speech. They are very interactive with musical toys to help promote early learning and support child development through play. They can engage a child, promote their fine motor skills, and develop their eye coordination.
A play phone that can keep your baby joyful during a role-playing game experience. It has 12 icons that produce different realistic sounds provided on the button icon pictures. It also has a lot of interactive games for different ages that are educative and fun to improve your kid’s communication and listening skills to learn more sounds and objects.
A child using dress-up clothes can develop their creative thinking and improve communication skills. They will also enhance language development and social skills when asking different questions to their parent and playmates.
This toddler toolset helps encourage a child’s imaginative play where they learn to listen to their inner self learn different tools and functions. You can engage them in space and ask them the role of each tool available in the tool kit.
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