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Kindergarten Readiness: Speech Development

What Is Speech Development?

A child's capacity to build sentences to communicate and how to vocalize sounds.

How Can I Teach This At Home?

Playing
1. Imitate actions and sounds with puppets. This is a great time to over-exaggerate sounds!

2. Let your child lead during play time! This will help them become more confident as they talk and play their way through activities.

Reading

1. When reading a book with a lot of punctuation, make sure your vocal inflection matches the reading. This will help children better understand how your tone can convey a specific part of speech.

2. Show children punctuation as it appears in books.

3. Read books that feature different parts of speech (e.g., nouns, pronouns, verbs, etc.).

 

Singing

1. Sing children's songs that feature repeated words and sounds.

2. Sing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with your child!


Talking

1. Encourage children to talk about things as they see them or as they are doing them. This will help with their speech production.

2. Ask your child a question. Encourage them to answer in complete sentences. Say the sentence you want to hear and have them repeat it. (e.g., If your child says, "There are goose on the lake", correct them by saying, "You're right. There are geese on the lake".)

Writing

1. Have children practice writing lists - this will help them understand that sentences and speech have an order.

2. When writing something, have your child watch as you construct the sentence or list. This will help them better understand sentence structure and punctuation.

Skills Checklist

Where Do I Start?

Need More?

The catalog for the Waco-McLennan County Library is available here!

If you want to search for more resources in our catalog in this subject, we suggest you search for the following subject headings:

For more assistance with searching and locating items held by the Waco-McLennan County Library, use our Ask a Librarian feature available on our catalog website or stop in to one of our branches!

The Waco-McLennan County Library provides patrons with access to resources through our Electronic Resources page, which can be found here. Suggested databases are listed below: