Top Tips for Helping Your Child Develop New Vocabulary

*Collaborative post.

Developing new words, phrases and synonyms is key for a lot of children when they’re learning about how to put sentences together and use them for comprehension exercises at school. A lot of words are picked up from listening to their parents, so it’s easy to integrate these words into daily life and let them pick up some new words to add to their knowledge.

Here are some fun and inviting ways to help your child with their vocabulary skills, from this junior school in Leicestershire.

Encourage your child to remember any new words they find

A visit to the museum is a great way of finding new words that your child won’t have heard or seen before. Let them make a note of these words and see if they can figure out what they mean, or give them synonyms of what the word could mean to help them along. Say it multiple times throughout the day so that they remember its pronunciation.

Have two-way conversations

Encourage your child to start conversations with you about whatever they find interesting. They may find that there are a lot of questions they’d love to know the answer to if they could; this also opens the floor for any words or phrases they’d never heard before. This gives them the practice they need to process their own thoughts and feelings.

Speak as you would an adult

Let your child pick up the more complicated vocabulary from you when you speak and try to avoid dumbing down your speech for your child. Drop the more complicated words into normal conversations to let your child pick it up for themselves; over time they’ll be able to put two and two together and speak them repeatedly. The more times they hear these words the more likely they are to pick them up and continually say them in conversation.