Early communication: supporting a child with additional needs

The best way for children with additional needs to develop their communication skills is through everyday activities and play with their family.

How you can help your child communicate

There are lots of ways you can help support your child’s early language and communication development.

Get on their level

It can help if you:

• get down to your child’s level and interact with them face to face
• watch how they play and join in by following their lead and interests
• wait for your child to start the interaction with you - for example, by looking at you, showing you something or saying something to you
• imitate how your child plays and the sounds they are making

Let them lead

Create opportunities for your child to take the lead or start the interaction. You could give them a choice of what to do or what to play with. For example, “ball or bubbles?”

Try giving them a little bit of something and wait for them to ask for more. For example,give a building block from a set of building blocks, to start an interaction.

Pause during a familiar routine or song. This gives them an opportunity to continue the routine or keep singing the song.

Adding to their language

Interpret your child’s messages by making simple comments or finishing the word. For example, if your child points to a balloon and says “ba”, you could say “balloon”.

Model words and short phrases about what is happening in the here and now. Depending on what activity you are doing, you could say things like “go car”, “big tower”, “teddy’s sleeping”.

You can help expand their language by adding on an extra word to what they say. If they say “ball”, you could say “red ball”.

Another way to help expand their language is to use:

• action words - for example, eating or jumping
• location words - for example, in or on
• descriptive words - for example, big, yellow or fast
• object words - for example, ball or car

Helping my child to talk

Helping my child to talk: Add to their words (video)

Keep the interaction going

Take turns to keep the interaction going. Go slow. This gives them time to process words.

Getting support

Talk to your speech and language therapist (SLT) for further advice about early communication development.