Verbal Skills

Remember that communicating is not only about using words to speak. It includes your child’s desire to connect with others by exchanging ideas and feelings, both verbally and non-verbally.

During the first years of life, children’s brains are developing rapidly and laying the foundation for learning. The interactions that children have with adults influence how children develop and learn. As a result, early childhood educators play a key role in providing children with interactions that can support their growth and development, particularly their language and communication skills.

Although the first year is really important for language development in children, major learning continues throughout a child’s early years onwards, as learning language is a lifelong process.

As your child grows, he will gradually build a repertoire of words and directions that he hears around him and try to use them to express his needs and feelings. Although your child might not be saying much in his early years, he can still understand a lot of what is going on around him.
Remember that communicating is not only about using words to speak. It includes your child’s desire to connect with others by exchanging ideas and feelings, both verbally and non-verbally.

Verbal skills of 4-year-old’s progress rapidly. They begin communicating in complex and compound sentences, have very few pronunciation errors and expand their vocabularies daily. They can follow multi-step instructions and understand explanations given for things they can see. Four-year-old’s frequently initiate conversations, are less likely to lose interest and change the subject of conversation to areas of personal interest and are getting better at sharing personal experiences.

Activities that can help in your 4 year old’s Verbal skill development:

• Narrate out loud when they are engaged in an activity. “You are playing hide and go seek with Ahmad. Where do you think Ahmad is hiding?”
• Help your children learn new words every day. Make them narrate their bedtime story out loud with you to encourage them to read. While reading their bed time story before they go to sleep, ask them questions about the story to encourage their communication.
• Talk with and listen to your child. Make eye contact on their level. Ask questions like, “If this happened what would you do?” or “What’s your favorite bedtime story and why?”
• Ask your child about his favorite part in a song and sing it together.