Babble Buddies

⭐️ 🐣 Calling all babies & caregivers of York Region! 🐣💫

The next Babble Buddies Circle Time sessions are starting soon. Join us for fun, interactive classes designed to spark connection and teach caregivers how to support baby’s communication development.

Each session is filled with:
🎶 Songs
📚 A story or two
💡 Tips on language development
🫧 Activities that captivate babies and are easy to replicate at home
💕 Connection and community building

✅ Register now at the link in bio!

👻 As pediatric SLPs, we get totally SPOOKED to hear stories of parents receiving misinformed advice on the regular.

What speech & language myths and misinformation should we add to our list? Share below 👇

Raising little humans is hard work! We’ve joined up with for their Life With a Toddler series where we’ll cover what to expect as your toddler's speech & language develops, common myths, and how you can support communication development at home.

🗓Monday May 16, 2022
⏰7:30pm
💻on Zoom

For more info or to register visit alli.io

If your child is going through a stage of calling all animals “dog” or all men “daddy” they might just be working on understanding categories. This particular example is referred to as “overextension of category,” meaning your child uses the same word for all items in a category.

Categorization skills are an important language skill especially as your child’s vocabulary grows. Categories help with language organization by making connections between words based on similarities and differences. This helps to sort, store and access words efficiently which becomes increasingly important with vocabulary growth.

Categorization begins early on and by toddlerhood you might notice your child starts to demonstrate categorization skills when they identify objects by category (e.g., handing you some pretend food when you say, “give mommy some food”) or groups objects in play (e.g., putting all vehicles together on the car mat and placing all animals in the barn).

Language development is pretty cool, huh!? 🤓

For all our vehicle-loving little friends 🚙🚜🚑🚒

Questions are one way to help your child participate in conversations - as long as they are sincere questions that require an answer and are not meant to test your child.

Testing questions or too many questions can actually discourage communication. Testing questions, usually meant to have your child show whether or not they know something (like “What’s that?” or “Who’s that?”), can be frustrating if your child doesn’t have a lot of words because they can’t yet answer these questions. And too many questions can interrupt the natural back-and-forth nature of conversations.

Try these effective strategies for encouraging more communication with your child:
- Use more comments to talk about your child’s interests. As a general rule of thumb, aim for 3 comments to every 1 question.
- Pause & wait. Your child might take a turn in the conversation if you wait long enough.
- Ask questions that are genuine and truly require an answer (e.g., do you want apple or banana for snack?)
- Ask questions that you know your child is able to answer. Answers might come in the form of a word, gesture, body language or facial expression.

Have questions about questions? Ask us! 👇

Spring song idea below! ⬇️ ☔️💦🌈🎶
(Bonus: it’s great for action word vocab!)

We’re adding this song to our puddle play on this rainy (almost!) spring day
(tune: if you’re happy and you know it)

I’m splashing in a puddle, how ‘bout you?
I’m splashing in a puddle, how ‘bout you?
I’m splashing in a puddle, oh I’m splashing in a puddle, oh
I’m splashing in a puddle, how ‘bout you?

Other verse ideas:
💦I’m jumping in a puddle…
☔️I’m stomping in a puddle…
🌧I’m searching for a puddle…
🌈I’m kicking in a puddle…

Do you have other puddle play songs or ideas? Share with us! ❤️

Words aren’t the only way to communicate. In fact, young children communicate with others in many ways, using body language (smiling), gestures (pointing), sounds/vocalizations (“ah!”) to send us messages, before words and phrases emerge.

When parents recognize and respond positively to a child’s messages in any form it helps:
- build an understanding how communication works
- reinforce and encourage attempts to communicate
- learn new and more sophisticated ways to send the same message

How is your child currently communicating with you? Let us know in the comments below 👇

It’s !! Pink Shirt Day helps bring awareness to the issue of bullying and raises funds to support programs that work to build healthy self-esteem in kids.

Here’s a snippet from The Globe and Mail that details how Pink Shirt Day came to be:

David Shepherd, Travis Price and their teenage friends organized a high-school protest to wear pink in sympathy with a Grade 9 boy who was being bullied [for wearing a pink shirt]…[They] took a stand against bullying when they protested against the harassment of a new Grade 9 student by distributing pink T-shirts to all the boys in their school. ‘I learned that two people can come up with an idea, run with it, and it can do wonders,’ says Mr. Price, 17, who organized the pink protest. ‘Finally, someone stood up for a weaker kid.’ So Mr. Shepherd and some other headed off to a discount store and bought 50 pink tank tops. They sent out message to schoolmates that night, and the next morning they hauled the shirts to school in a plastic bag. As they stood in the foyer handing out the shirts, the bullied boy walked in. His face spoke volumes. ‘It looked like a huge weight was lifted off his shoulders,’ Mr. Price recalled. The bullies were never heard from again.”
— GLOBE & MAIL

Join us by wearing pink today and spreading kindness everyday.

Phonological processes are totally normal! In fact, it’s amazing how young children use these patterns or “tricks” to make talking easier as they work on mastering all the sounds in their language.

For most processes, there is an expected age of elimination when most children will have grown out of using the process on their own.

When children use phonological processes past the expected age of elimination, or use processes that are considered atypical, evaluation by Speech-Language Pathologist is recommended.

Velar fronting is when a “back sound” (e.g., “K” and “G”) is replaced with a “front sound” (e.g., “T” and “D”):
🍪“tootie ” for cookie
💚“deen” for green
☕️“tup” for cup

Look for your child to grow out of this error pattern around age 3 1/2.

When you pop the L but your toddler can’t read anyway 🤷‍♀️

Happy Valentine’s Day eve to all- especially the parents frantically filling out their kids’ valentines to bring to school/daycare tomorrow. ❤️