JJ only talked to repeat or sing nursery rhymes. So we knew that he could talk. He needed to hear words spoken, sentence structure, he needed to be introduced to new ideas. He needed someone to model all of this for him.
I credit the free program, 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten, for teaching these things to my older children. We enrolled both boys in the program through our local library. I had kept a lot of my older kids' outgrown books, but the majority of the books I read came from the library.
When we started the boys had very short attention spans, but loved to snuggle. I started by reading books with a sentence per page, like BOB Books. Then we worked our way up to level 1 and level 2 readers. Eventually we were reading longer books or multiple short books.
We often reread books, but I only counted them on the list once. I wanted the boys to hear as many new words and new ideas as possible. I read a mix of fiction and nonfiction.
It helped. Lil' Bro was slightly behind in his speech, but had caught up by the end of the program. JJ started to talk more, though still not truly communicating.
MR
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