We cover in our post entitled "Extend your Vocabulary to Stressbust™" the importance of being willing and open to extending our internal and external vocal dialogue.
And now that Her Majesty the Baby is approaching 2, we are as a result very selective with the tone and content of language and actions we use around and to communicate with her.
By way of example:-
● instead of bombarding her with "Yes" and "No"'s, we interchange these with "Broken" and "Fixed" so that rather than feeling dictated to, she perceives a positive action on her part to have been an achievement
● now that she can count from 1 to 10, we pace and order the stages of tasks using numbers so she doesn't try to rush everything and better appreciates the value of gradual progression and patience
● we use words to reflect their meaning; so, we say the word "slowly" very slowly, take a long time to say the words "long time" and even mouth the word "tasty" in a very tasty manner, as we find this assists comprehension and context
● we taught the meaning of a thumbs up and thumbs down early, so Her Majesty could easily convey what is working for her and what is not at a particular time in spite of her limited vocabulary. And we were recently very pleased to hear that one of her first sentences was "I don't like that"
● we use the term "sorry" a lot between ourselves but do not make a fuss of it, as we would not like Her Majesty to envisage saying sorry as being anything other than a time to time necessity or demonstrative of some sort of weakness, for reasons we explain further in our post entitled ""Sorry (needn't!) be the Hardest Word""
● as multilinguasts, we sometimes say the same word first in English, then in, e.g. French, after our health visitor confirmed this was the best way to embrace a positive and useful exercise of introducing more than one language to a toddler. We do not, however, overdo this, with the intention merely being to introduce her to the fact of other languages and their accents, using similarly pronounced words such as "blue" and "bleu", "ball" and "balle", "one" and "un".
We have found these techniques to be really fruitful in the case of our toddler, but as always would welcome readers own, equally valid, experiences.
For further information that readers may find of relevance to this post, please see our post entitled "Modes of Questioning to Stressbust™ for Loved Ones".
BigLuv
MikeyM™, LouLoU™ & a very self satisfied Her Majesty 😊😍😎🧡💛💕 xxxx