Learn With Less

Puppets are singular in their diverse ability to entertain, teach and connect. In this episode of Learn With Less, Ayelet explores the merits of puppets and the ways we can use them in play!

Below is the transcript of this episode’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode.

For additional information, music, play ideas and the complete interactive family experience, please listen to the entire episode.

Let’s go back now to the use of puppets. We touched upon their interactive nature, and their natural capacity to promote “joint attention” skills and social interaction.

Using them with young children in song or rhythmic chants is a wonderful way to utilize their ability to entertain and teach.

They are very useful tools to encourage creative play and vocabulary development – and can be great for you as a parent to help you feel comfortable being silly, which, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes, is a really useful way to keep your child engaged and enhance the interaction.

Since they come in all shapes and sizes, puppets can become characters in reading activities by acting out parts of the story, they can provide an entertaining distractor for little hands to reach and hold as baby becomes more wiggly and mobile. 

Puppets can help your baby to stay entertained – during care routines (which we know are more emotionally satisfying for your little one when there is interaction and participation on both your parts), or while on the go. You can use smaller finger puppets in the stroller, car, public transportation…  

They can play peek-a-boo, sing silly songs, or tell stories. They can be used to focus on or talk about specific vocabulary, such as body parts or action words (the puppet can point to its own body parts or your baby’s) or can act out actions like crawling, dancing, eating, etc. There is truly no limit to their use.

And that, right there, is another reason why I love them. Puppets are open-ended toys. There is no specific way to use them that’s “correct,” they can be used and enjoyed in very different ways by a child who is three months or three years old. They promote interaction (without human involvement, they do just sit there!) 

And the more playful, creative, and silly you can help them to be, the more enjoyment, bonding, and naturally fun learning time you can have together with your young child. I plan to bring you more DIY puppet-making ideas in future episodes.

But I want to dedicate this episode and the “Dishwashing Glove Puppet” to my mother, who continued to pass down the tradition of “Endig, Wendig, Featherwick, Weatherwick, Bumpus, Little Pea, Patty Lou, Lulu Whistle, Whistle Nozzle, and Kadabowobble-wobble” from her great aunt Marie, to my son, who now gets a big smile on his face every time he sees a yellow glove, and starts to giggle the words, “Kadabowobble-wobble.”

Happy Mother’s Day, to my mother, and to all the mothers and incredible caregivers, future parents, and adoptive and step-parents out there listening. I’m thrilled to be part of your family’s experience.

Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest

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In this episode of Learn With Less, Ayelet discusses the importance of adult responsiveness to infant and toddler attempts at communication.

So much of our response shapes and informs our childrens’ communication with the world – the more we can reach into their world and pull out what we can, the more we shape their ability to be heard, their confidence in expressing themselves, and their desire to connect.

Below is the transcript of this episode’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode.

For additional information, music, play ideas and the complete interactive family experience, please listen to the entire episode.

When we talk about what we see our young children doing, we call attention to the fact that every behavior is inherently communicative in some way. If you say, “oh, I see you batting at the picture of the bear on the mat – are you interested in him? Look at his big ears!” – you read into what your child is doing, and create a sort of social narrative behind it.

As time goes on, your baby trusts that you’re paying attention, and that you’re making a good effort to read his actions and communication attempts! Even when we think we’re paying close attention, I can say with certainty and with experience that we often miss so much of what our children are learning!

Young children are learners: that’s what they do! We’ve talked a lot about the fact that their studying of an object, their movement in a particular way, their vocalization or gaze in a particular direction – this is what learning looks like. When we sit back, comment on what they’re doing, respond to their needs and desires, and give them physical and emotional support without bombarding them, both parties often feel more satisfied!

I want to talk for a moment about a term, “communicative intent.” As humans, we are all communicators – whether we are able to speak or not. When your young infant studies the bear on his play mat, and then looks up at you, is he not looking for a response with his gaze? It is our job to decide whether that gaze intended to tell us something specific – whether there was a specific message associated with it, and what that might be. 

My general practice, both in my work as a speech-language pathologist and as a mother of a young child, is that it is almost always safe to assume intentionality.

Developmental research confirms that there is a relationship between the responsiveness of parents and caregivers of pre-verbal children (those with and without develop.mental delays) and acquisition of language. I

n other words, when we respond to our young children’s non-verbal communicative efforts (their gestures, their gaze, their vocalizations and even those we associate with negative behaviors such as grabbing or pulling), we honor that this is an effort to communicate, and our response to their communicated message has a positive effect on their growing ability to express themselves through language.

Of course, once they start to use language, the importance of our responsiveness doesn’t change! I want to tell you about an experience I had with my own son when he was about 15 months old. He was using “one-word sentences” at that time, which, of course, continued to require a fair amount of decoding on my end.

My mother, he and I had gone out to lunch at a restaurant, and as we were waiting for our food, he suddenly stated, “hat!” Of course, my mom and I started trying to figure out what he wanted to say about a hat… neither of us were wearing hats, nobody in the restaurant within his view was wearing a hat… was he asking me to put my hat back on? I did, but that didn’t seem to satisfy him. Did he want me to be silly? I put the napkin on my head and asked him if that was the hat he wanted.

What he did next blew my mind – he pointed to a woman at a table across from us, who was wearing a headscarf, and again, said, “hat!” He was making an observation – and using the closest associative word he knew to describe it, calling our attention to something that was out of the ordinary in his world. We affirmed that yes, it was like a hat, that you could call it a scarf or a headscarf.

My mom was wearing a scarf around her neck, and she offered to put it on his head to try it on. He was thrilled. This was clearly the ultimate goal, “What’s that thing she’s wearing that’s like a hat but not, and how do I get one of those to try on my own head?” He had gotten his message across, and we had successfully decoded the multi-faceted nature of it.

The point I’m trying to make here is that there is so much our little ones are trying to tell us or ask of us, even when they can’t! Even when we can’t see it. 

And it’s often not what we would have expected! The best we can do is think about all the different reasons we communicate… to connect what they express to our own knowledge of their experience and interests, and hope that we don’t miss too much!

Bates, E. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press.

Wetherby, A., Cain, D., Yonclas, D., & Walker, V. (1988). Analysis of intentional communication of normal children from the prelinguistic to the multiword stage. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 31, 240-252.

Yoder, P.J. & Warren, S.F. (1999). Maternal Responsivity Mediates the Relationship Between Prelinguistic Intentional Communication and Later Language. Journal of Early Intervention, 1999. 22:126-136. http://vkc.mc.vanderbilt.edu/yoder/pdfs/yoder-p-j–warren-s-f-1999.pdf

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This episode of Learn With Less focuses on this topic – and Ayelet gives you ideas to use musical experiences with your babbling baby to develop the sense of “vocal play” that results in experimentation, play and – ultimately – language! 

Below is the transcript of this episode’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode.

For additional information, music, play ideas and the complete interactive family experience, please listen to the entire episode. 

On the last episode of Learn With Less,  (Communication, The First 6 Months), we talked about the typical development of infant communication within the first 6 months of life, and we ended our conversation with the topic of babbling, or the sounds your baby makes with his mouth that combine both a consonant and vowel – like “bababababa.”

There’s some interesting research to suggest that rhythmic arm movements (like banging) increase substantially around the same time as the onset of babbling, and that there is a definitive relationship between infant gesture and the acquisition of spoken language. 

We already know that gesture is one very clear form of non-verbal communication. Today we sang a song that made use of gestures, both representational (like waving, which represents a greeting) and referential (like pointing, which helps us refer to something being pointed at), as well as traditional or personal “signs” – hand movements or motions which can represent a specific word, thought or idea.

You are welcome to use whatever hand signal or representational sign that works within your family. When you watch my video, you can see the gestures I use, which are adaptations of signs from American Sign Language.

You may have questions about using signs with a child who is not deaf or hard-of-hearing – I’ll focus more in depth on that topic in a future episode, but for now, I’ll mention that there has been a lot of research on this, and the consensus is that a young child will use the most efficient, effective, and easiest form of communication presented to them.

If your child is accustomed to hearing English (or any other verbal language) as his primary language, then when he can speak, he will! Signing can be considered a form of gesture (a very specific representational gesture), and, again, gestures often develop before speech.

Remember that most children are starting to babble around the same time as  they start to experiment with movements of their arms (such as banging a drum) – this is a good way of thinking about how precise their movements are – and how much more precise these movements will need to be to sequence all the sounds in a word.

But all of this is a progression of ability – first we see larger, less refined movements, like banging, or sweeping with the hand to move an item from one place to another, or babbling with a simple consonant-vowel combination… and then those eventually turn into more precise movements and sequencing of movements – gestures like pointing or signing, pincer grasping with the thumb and forefinger, and actual words which require a particular set of sounds in a particular sequence.

[The second rhythmic activity we did in this episode] is great fun if you have a toddler or preschooler who can repeat rhythms back to you… but what about a little babbler? That activity is going to be fun for him to listen to on this podcast, and interesting for him to watch you do, but way too complicated for him to actually perform in imitation.

So how can we make it more about him? We can switch the activity around – and imitate the rhythms he makes! When we do this, we make rhythms together, we take turns, and we validate and repeat what our little ones create. So if he makes three short bursts, you make three short bursts – and then pause. Wait for him to go again. When he does, imitate his rhythms again!

He may notice what you’re doing, and get a real kick out of it! Do this with vocalizations, as well – this encourages your baby to engage in that vocal play, because he sees that you can be playful, too! There is a stage within that first year of life when typically developing babies realize that their caregivers are imitating them – and most of the time, they find this pretty hilarious, or at least fascinating!

You may have heard that using “baby talk” with your baby is not a good idea. If all you’re saying to your infant all day long is “goo goo gah gah,” then yes, please build actual words into your repertoire. Or if what you’re doing with your verbal toddler is repeating back his infantilized versions of words (“wawa” for water or “bup” for “cup”),  regardless of how cute it might be, try to stop that, too!

Again, children learn through imitation, so when we use actual and correct forms of words, and correct sentence structure, that is what we’re going to be teaching them. This vocal play imitation is different from “baby talk” in several ways – first, I’m assuming that this is not the only time you talk with your child. By all means, talk to your child using actual language!

Narrate your day until you feel like a walking audiobook. Talk about what you’re doing, what your child is doing, what you see, where you’re going, etc., no matter whether your child is 3 days or 3 years old. But also, stop to engage in vocal play like the kind we were talking about just now.

This kind of interaction falls under the category of social play, and when you do it again and again, your baby is able to categorize it as a “social routine” or a game that he plays with you – another example being a game like peek-a-boo.

Even pre-verbal children can request things like social routines by actually initiating them, or by getting into the same position or bringing you the same props you used the last time you played that way. It takes us paying attention to those associations our children are making to sometimes read their cues.

Why Sign? – Learn With Less Podcast episode featuring Learn With Adrienne

5 Strategies to Promote Communication In Your Young Child – Learn With Less Podcast episode featuring Carrie Clark of Speech & Language Kids

Iverson, J. M., Hall, A. J., Nickel, L., & Wozniak, R. H. (2007). The Relationship between Reduplicated Babble Onset and Laterality Biases in Infant Rhythmic Arm Movements. Brain and Language, 101(3), 198–207. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2006.11.004

Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest

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This episode of Learn With Less is focused on those wonderful, intense and amazing first 6 months of an infant’s life – and the parts of communicative development about which it helps to become aware! 

Below is the transcript of this episode’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode.

For additional information, music, play ideas and the complete interactive family experience, please listen to the entire episode. 

Today, I want to talk about a few of the very early parts of communication development – those that typically happen in around the first 6 months of our babies’ lives.

There is so much that happens in that first year of life, in all areas of our infants’ learning.

Our babies grow from tiny (let’s face it, adorable blob-like) beings to tiny people starting to express their personalities, desires, and interests. In recent years, there’s been a real push to help parents and caregivers become more aware of “developmental milestones” – I very much encourage you to be aware of the basic things to look for, but I want to highlight also that obsessing over each milestone is not necessarily conducive for healthy support of our children’s learning, either!

It’s more about the whole picture. Also, there is always a range of “what’s normal.” If you are the parent of an infant who has come into this world under more challenging circumstances than others, or you are concerned that your child is not communicating the way you see other same-aged children doing, I encourage you to talk to your child’s medical provider or developmental specialist to gather more information.

Knowledge is power, and the more information you can collect – about your child’s hearing ability, about therapeutic techniques you or a specialist can do to help stimulate your child’s communication skills – the more your child can benefit!

We touched upon the earliest form of purposeful communication, crying. Interestingly, around 6 weeks is also when we start to see what’s known as a “social smile,” or an intentional smile… yes, grown-ups, sorry to disappoint, but in the early days and weeks after birth, you may have seen your baby turn her mouth upwards, seemingly smiling… though this is beautiful to witness and a nice preview, it is most likely your precious one making a slight effort to pass gas.

I think many of us feel, when that first real interactive smile comes, that this was SO necessary – because up until that point, we’ve essentially been slaves to this beautiful and wondrous tiny being, not sleeping, rarely eating or bathing, and there hasn’t been a whole lot of reciprocation. And then, those lips turn up… and wow. Thank you! 

What’s fascinating is that that 6-8-week mark when you see that first social smile and when your baby realizes that if she cries, you will help her – it comes at around the same time… indicating that around this time, your baby is starting to make connections about human behavior!

She realizes that returning your smile keeps your attention! This is another wonderful early step in back-and-forth communication, and can be a great way to development of her self-esteem, as smiling back lets your baby know her feelings are important.

I mentioned earlier that in the first 3 months, the sounds your baby makes are mostly uncontrolled. Around the 4-month mark, clear vowel sounds start to emerge. This is when you start to hear those lovely “ah-ooo” pleasure sounds that are so sweet.

Vowels are open sounds, that don’t require a whole lot of specific tongue placement. They are all in the mouth shape (eeee, ooooo, aaaah), and therefore, the most obvious to imitate!

The next step in this “vocal progression” (which, I’ll just say, is not a simple hand-off between one to the next! It will more likely be much more fluid than that), happens as your baby starts to play more with the sounds she is able to make, and that she sees and hears you making. You might see her purposefully playing with the flow of air through her lips as she makes raspberries (bbbbpppfff)…

The more “speech-like” vocal play includes both vowels as well as consonants, and is called babbling. You might hear your baby start to babble anytime between the ages of 4 – 10 months. Usually, babbling starts as what’s called “reduplicated babbling” – meaning that your baby may start to say “ma” and then “mamamamama.” These sounds are not yet considered words – though you may hear “mama” or “dada” or “papa.”

Your baby’s environment (as in, you!) starts to encourage production of these sounds – as in, you reinforce your baby when you hear her make various sounds, and as time moves on, she starts to babble not just to stimulate herself because it’s fun and feels good, but for a social purpose – when she “speaks,” she gets reinforced by you.

Those first consonants that you often hear are also /m/, /b/, /p/, /w/ – those that are formed on the lips (known in the linguistic world as “bilabials”) – though you may also hear others that are made toward the front of the mouth, with the tongue pressing on the ridge behind the front teeth like /d/ or /t/ (these are pressing on the alveolar ridge, and are therefore known as “alveolars”).

It makes one wonder which came first – the babbling of “mama, dada, papa” or the fact that those names are almost universally the same in so many languages? Fascinating stuff for any of you linguistic or child development nerds out there!

So, wow – all that happening by around 6 months… Now, again, I want to reiterate that if your infant is not exhibiting these communication behaviors within the timeframe that I spoke about in this episode, you are encouraged to discuss it with your child’s medical provider.

Hearing is also a huge factor in all of this – if a child is unable to hear the sounds around her, she will be unable to imitate them. That goes for both hearing loss, fluid in the ears, and also a child who is so uncomfortable or sick that she is crying and cannot hear or attend to her caregivers. It takes a village, as they say, and the medical community’s job is to be there to support families!

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In this episode of Learn With Less, Ayelet explores the ways we as caregivers and educators support our young children in one aspect of social/emotional development: relationship building.

The discussion delves into the use of tools we have at our disposal (including screens) – and the efficacy of these tools!

Below is a transcript of this week’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode. 

For an interactive musical family experience, please listen to the entire episode.

Let’s go back to our earlier discussion of the use of photographs to help us support our childrens’ development of positive relationships.

I mentioned that using printed photographs, while it can be a bit more effortful, can really pay off in play.

Using actual photographs as manipulable materials that your baby can handle (otherwise known as “manipulatives) is a great sensory experience for your small child, in that they can use multiple senses to explore that object, including their sense of sight to look at the image, their hands to explore the tactile qualities of the picture, and any other senses (the smell, and likely the taste, of the cardboard or plastic, the feel of it moving in space, the sound of it as it hits the ground or other surrounding objects, etc).

Additional ways to use photos in your home as invitations to discuss the images might be adding photo albums to your book collection, placing photos in sheet protectors or hanging wall pockets low on the wall where your small child can easily look at, point, or talk about them from his vantage point. Sometimes, low-tech is better than high-tech!

Remember that getting your child used to viewing photos or videos on your phone will get him used to using your phone as his “manipulative” – and, as much as possible, I encourage you to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics and other organizations around the world that regard overuse of screen time as unhealthy for infants and toddlers, especially under the age of two years old.

When we interact with our children, we provide a direct reaction to their actions and expressions. Television, movies, video games, apps – they don’t do that. We know children learn best through imitation and interaction with us, and from three-dimensional relationships with other people or objects.

Now, there is one exception that has been studied a lot recently – and that is the use of video chat. Very young babies (from 6 months old!) are able to tell whether the person talking to them is responding to them in “real time,” and since video chat is a very easy way to stay in touch with loved ones who are far away, many families (even those who tend to stay away from other sorts of screen time) use video chat to create and maintain a “face-to-face” interaction.

Several studies (referenced below) have researched language learning in both a live interaction and video chat, and found that young children ARE able to learn new vocabulary and imitate actions through video chat, suggesting that young children are not only able to attend, but also able to learn through this type of interaction. Especially when supported by a caregiver who is present (someone to man the device, to explain why the image of Grandpa’s face froze or why the sound is disjointed), young children can derive meaning and enjoy affection through this kind of interaction.

I speak from experience when I say that my own son has successfully reinforced relationships with both my partner’s and my extended families through the tool that is video chat… he knew my parents’ pets names, was at least somewhat familiar with the type of space they lived in or the layout of the particular room in which they chatted, their voices and funny facial expressions – long before we visited them in person.

In addition, I remember video chatting with my husband when we were apart, when my son was just 6 months old. When he saw my husband’s face, he became very excited, very vocal, and very smiley… To me, all of this was proof that video chat was very different from other non-interactive types of screen time.

Now, that said, we all do what we need to do to survive as parents and caregivers. The important part of decisions that we make for our own families as that we do so as informed citizens to the best of our ability!

LaFrance, A. (2015). Do Babies Know When They’re Skyping? The Atlantic. Technology, 10 Sept. 2015. < http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/do-babies-know-when-theyre-skyping/404650/>

Roseberry, S., Hirsch-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R.M. (2014). Skype Me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn Language. Child Development, 85(3), 956-970.

Simcock, G., & DeLoache, J. (2006). Get the picture? The effects of iconicity on toddlers’ reenactment from picture books. Developmental psychology,42(6), 1352.

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