Research suggests that the most important stages of a child’s development is from birth up until 3 years old. Every interaction your little one has in their early years, whether that be in nursery or at home, is teaching them more and more about how to communicate with the world around them.
Teaching your children important communication skills as they develop may seem daunting. That’s why we’ve put together some fun activities you can do together that will make developing communication and language in their early years fun and rewarding.
Memory games
Doing memory games with your infants helps to strengthen their recall and improve their attention-span/concentration skills, ready for when they start school.
Strengthening your child’s memory also helps them with the mental ability to process and organise information as their brains develop.
There are hundreds of memory games, suitable for teaching communication and language to early years. One of our favourites is the ‘card matching game’.
How to play:
- Ensure you have a set of cards that contain all matching pairs
- Spread all cards out on a flat surface, face down.
- Take it in turns to choose any two cards. Make a successful match and you get to take another turn. If there’s no match, the cards are returned to their original position.
- When choosing the cards, ask your child to describe the colours and shapes they see on the cards
- The game then relies upon your child remembering where they have seen each picture in previous turns
Listening games
Making a DIY telephone from a cup or some card makes for a really fun game for young children, allowing them to improve their social interaction and listening skills.
Games that create an environment around conversation help to replica communication that they will have in their later years.
This is a great game to play for communication and language development with a group of early years infants. You could ask your infant to pass on a message to the group through the telephone and watch them develop those vital communication skills amongst themselves.
Nursery Rhymes
Nursery rhymes tend to play a huge part in a young child’s life. As well as being a lovely way to interact with your baby or toddler, they can actually play a big part in supporting their development.
These rhymes help to sharpen communication, numeracy, social and even motor skills. Singing nursery rhymes in a group can also help your infant with team building and give them a sense of community.
Musical Statues
Musical statues is a much loved game, played by children of all ages. It’s a particularly good activity to promote communication and language in early years because it conveys the value of patience, listening and attention. Music itself is also incredibly beneficial in your child’s early years.
You can play musical statues with your young children at home as a fun activity to try, as well as helping to develop a range of crucial skills.
Get in touch
Here at All About Children we are dedicated to supporting your child’s development. Our days are filled with communication and language activities for early years that set the foundation for them to flourish.
For more information on how we can support your infants development, or to book a nursery viewing, contact us today.