Learning to Listen

Welcome to Fall semester in the Toddler room! This is our first blog posting and we are going to talk about learning to listen. If you were in the parent-infant program you may already be familiar with some of the toys and activities that we use for learning to listen. Either way, here are some questions that you might have about the learning to listen toys.

1) What are some learning to listen toys?
Anything fun for your child! At school we like to play with toys that are related by categories. We do this so , as kids learn new words they are also learning concepts. For example, we may show the following toys together: train, car, boat... then: duck, horse, cow.

2) How do we maximize our children's understanding of the sounds and words that we use?
We start by associating certain objects (toys) with specific sounds. For example, the duck goes "quack, quack, quack", with a short, broken pattern, but the cow goes "moooooo" with a long, continuous pattern. By emphasizing the auditory differences between these patterns that are associated with these toys, we make it easier for children with new cochlear implants or hearing aids to discriminate between sounds. Some other examples of setting up auditory differences are contrasting high pitch (mouse goes "eee" with a high voice) verses low pitch (dog goes "woof woof" with a low voice).

3) What do you mean by sound associations anyway?
When objects have a certain sound/sound pattern to represent them, this creates early meaning for your child, even before you child has words. Here are a few sound associations for some common toys: baby (long "shh" sound with finger up to your lips), ice cream (long "mmm" as you hold the ice cream up as if to eat it) and bubbles (short "pop, pop, pop" as you pop the bubbles with your finger). Children seem to enjoy doing the motor movement first, and then producing the sounds as well. By the way, we have extra toy ice cream cones that are filled with bubbles. Let us know if you would like to have one.

4) Why should we play with the listen and learn toys?
It's important for you and your child to have a common language when talking about toys. Kids learn the best through repetition, so try to always use the same sound associations when you are playing with these toys. The goal is to create a common "language" or understanding of those toys. We are also capitalizing on joint attention and turn taking on these activities.

Once your child is making these sounds with the objects, you can keep playing with these toys and expand the language. We will target more expanded language in our next blog.

Let us know if you have any questions!
~Erika and Amanda