Expanding Vocabulary: at the park

With this great weather, who wouldn’t want to take the kids to the park so they can play and run around until they get tired? You might ask yourself, how can I make play time a learning experience as well? Easy! Here you will find useful tips to incorporate playtime to your child’s vocabulary lesson.

We can begin our lesson from the get-go, the car ride. “Look the sun, HOT”, “It is so HOT”; simultaneously integrating the hand gesture for “HOT”. Once you arrive at the park, let’s use our surroundings, for example, “Wow! Look at the GREEN grass”, “the BIG trees, they have GREEN leaves”, the objective here is to provide your child with descriptive characteristics of the objects surrounding them, such as plants or animal you might see as you enjoy the park. Always making sure to point and clearly identify the object you are describing and that the child is paying attention. Important! Allow your child to touch, smell and play with these objects, if possible. Using their 5 senses increases their capability to associate the new words to tangible objects, therefore making the learning process faster. Talk about the sky: “the BLUE sky”, “it is UP with the clouds”; if it’s a rainy day: “the sky is GRAY or BLACK”. The key here is to talk, talk and talk in complete ideas and sentences to your child.

Try these ideas and come back and share your experience with me in the comment section of the blog.

*Translated by Valery Martinez