Your child is saying one word utterances. Great! Now, how to get them to two words.
Books
Some books are great to help you child say their first words and grow their one-word vocabulary. But they can restrict your child's opportunities to put two words together. Other books may be too advanced for them to engage with effectively. This is a list of some books that help target short, two-word phrases so you can expand your child's one word utterances to two.
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Fox's Socks, by Julia Donaldson
Pants, by Giles Andreae
Where is Maisy, by Lucy Cousins
Big Little, by Leslie Patricelli
Where is the Green Sheep, by Mem Fox
(excellent for pairing verbs and adjectives)
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see, by Bill Martin Jr/Eric Carle
(phrase examples: open/close, body-parts, hi/bye)
General Play
Bath Game: You can play a game with your child where you bathe your child or a toy and use phrases like 'wash ---, pour water, dirty --, clean ---).
Feeding animals/dolls: common phrases with this play are: drink --, cut --, eat --.
Bubbles: common phrases with this play are: blow bubbles, more bubbles, open bubbles, pop bubbles, etc.
Car Ramp: common phrases with this play are: go car, car up, car down, car drive, car crash, etc.
Older Children Activity
Magnetic Scenes help use pronouns and verbs as the characters can be moved around to do activities. Magnetic Schoolroom and Magnetic Town have particularly useful everyday language.
Apps
My Playhome is a great app to help a child navigate the vocabulary of a house and pair pronouns with verbs of common action around the house or common nouns in everyday interactions at home. You can also get it on Apple or Google.
You can find opportunities to expand your child's speech from one to two words in everyday interactions anytime as well! These are resources that can support that.
This post had contributions from Speech Language Pathologists Ibtissam Mustaq and Anna Maria Mersov.
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