Specific Vocabulary

A significant part of what I share with parents comes back to a simple message - learning is in the daily living.

Your child is in the developmental process of acquiring the customs, habits, and skills of being a human being.

Your seemingly quotidien actions - grocery shopping, tying your shoes, conversation with a friend, washing your dishes, scrubbing your shower floor, feeding your cat - are powerful constructive material for your child.

Other skills - literacy, numeracy, science - can layer on top of this, developed over time and in connective, relevant ways, on a stable foundation of daily experiences. Let’s start with the grocery store.

Your child has an incredible capacity for language development under the age of 6 years. Young children have a unique sensitivity to the absorption of language. But this language must also be meaningful, relevant, and connective.

Like the names of the potatoes you cook together for dinner!

Look at all these lovely types of potato, and the beautiful vocabulary words we have for them.

What could be more relevant and connective to a young child than a trip to the market to choose a few types of potatoes together and then taking them home to prepare and cook, naming them all the while? Yukon, russet, fingerling.

When you offer specific vocabulary to young children, you do many things. You offer them a way to label their world with accuracy. Vocabulary becomes a tool of more successful communication. You support the development of speech, as young children form and articulate new words. You support their capacity to retain information.

We call this classified vocabulary in a Montessori context. We love working with classifications - types of potato, types of dog, types of flowering tree, types of shark, types of motor vehicle.

When you offer specific language to a child, their capacity for specific, organized thought expands. You see a more skillful communicator who interacts with the world more precisely.

Most parents have room to improve when it comes to specific vocabulary.

From the start, call a dog a dog - not a woof woof.

At two or three, call a dog a Golden retreiver or a Chihuahua or an Akita.

And a key concept to remember is that language must be meaningful.

Look at a book of construction vehicles and then name them specifically in the world around you.

Name the spring flowers at Trader Joes and bringing a bunch home.

Identify pit bulls and Australian shepherds and smooth or wire-haired dachshunds on the street when you’re out for a walk.

Be specific, and your child will be, too.