Your child will learn to imitate actions from familiar routines, try to attract your attention with their actions, and start to recognize some familiar cause-and-effect relationships.

Understanding cause and effect is important for a child to know that their actions (including speech) can have effects on other people.

Initiating (starting) a familiar routine shows your child understands they’ll get an effect.

At this level, respond to your child’s action as if it was intentional and had a meaning. For example, they put their hands together and you imitate that and say, “pat-a-cake!” This helps your child learn they can initiate a familiar routine.

You are teaching early conversation skills.

Today’s activity: Continue to use familiar social games and look for opportunities to use them when they come up in a new situation: “Peek!” when getting dressed, “pat-a-cake” when you see your child’s hands together.

Visit www.TheInteractionCoach.com to see the directory of speech-language pathologists licensed in your area. If you can’t find one in the directory, contact me at [email protected] and I’ll track down someone for you.