5 things I do every day with my toddler (as a Speech Therapist)

Getting your child into the habit of listening to audio stories early is one of the best things you can do for their language development. It's something I started with my daughter as young as two and the difference it makes is remarkable.

As a speech therapist, one of the things I talk about constantly is the power of audio for language development. The more words your child hears, in different voices, different contexts, different stories, the faster their vocabulary grows.

So the question isn't whether to use audio. It's finding something good enough to actually make a difference.

Which is why when I found Sooper Books I just couldn't stop talking about it. I still can't.

It's an independent studio, they write and produce everything in-house, and you can genuinely hear the difference. The character voices are superb. My daughter will hear the same character say the same word in a completely different way depending on what's happening in the story. That kind of exposure is exactly what we talk about in speech therapy.

There are hundreds of high quality audio stories, new ones added every week, and it grows with your child all the way up to nine or ten years old. You buy it once and it just keeps giving.

And if you've spent any time on my channel you'll know I am absolutely Yoto mad. Sooper Books syncs directly to your Yoto player. It saves me hours every week. Hours.

Honestly, nothing matches or even comes close. I have scoured everything. It just doesn't exist.

Try Sooper Books →

If you've seen my channel you'll know books are my thing. Like, genuinely my thing. I would go to Waterstones every single week if I could get away with it.

But beyond the obvious joy of reading together, there's a real speech and language reason to make it a daily habit. Books build vocabulary, encourage pointing and gesture, and give children a reason to communicate. Even just choosing which book to read next is a language opportunity.

My absolute number one recommendation for toddlers is You Choose by Nick Sharratt and Pippa Goodhart. There's a reason it's a classic. Every page is a conversation starter, every image is a chance for your child to point, name, respond. And they've just released You Choose Farm which is perfect if you've got a younger one.

Animal noises, vehicle sounds, lift-the-flap surprises. Things like that are often the first sounds children feel confident copying. As an SLT I look for that in books, and You Choose has it in abundance.

Honestly just sit down with it, your child will do the rest.

You Choose by Nick Sharratt →

I used to think nursery rhymes were just sweet little songs we sang because that's what you do with babies. And then I trained as a speech and language therapist and realised they are so much more than that.

They have survived hundreds of years not because of sentimentality. It's because they work on a neurological level that almost nothing else does for young children.

Here's the thing that genuinely surprises most parents when I tell them.

When adults speak naturally we don't pause between words. To a child's ear, "would you like a biscuit" is one continuous stream of sound. Learning to hear where one word ends and the next begins is one of the hardest things a young child has to do. It's called phonological awareness and it is the single biggest predictor of reading ability. Not letter recognition. Not phonics flashcards. This.

Nursery rhymes solve this almost accidentally. The rhythm forces natural word boundaries. The repetition means your child hears the same pattern over and over. The rhyme at the end of each line trains their ear to notice that two words share the same sound ending. That is literally the foundation of how children learn to read.

And the nonsense words? Hickory dickory dock. Humpty Dumpty. Those aren't flaws. They are features. Nonsense words are actually harder to process than real words because there's no meaning to anchor them. A child who can repeat nonsense words accurately has stronger phonological processing. We use nonsense word repetition as a clinical assessment tool. It's that significant.

Start with the ones they already know and love. Familiarity is the point. And what I love about the nursery rhymes on Sooper Books is that they're spoken, not sung. No music, just voice. That means your child is processing pure language, the rhythm, the words, the pattern, without a melody doing the heavy lifting for them. That's a much more powerful workout for a developing brain.

This is the one that gets parents every time. And I love sharing it because it completely flips the way most people think about helping their child talk.

Most parents assume the best thing they can do is ask questions. "What's that? What colour is it? What does the doggy say?" It feels right. It feels engaging. It feels like teaching.

But here's what we know from speech and language therapy. Questions put a child under pressure to perform. And a child under pressure closes down, not opens up.

The thing that actually works is this. Narrate instead.

Talk out loud about what you're both doing, like a sports commentator. "We're putting on our shoes. The red ones. One shoe, two shoes. These are a bit tight today." No question at the end. No expectation of a response. Just real language attached to real moments.

Children learn language by hearing it in context, not by being tested on it. A question removes the context. A running commentary provides it continuously.

And here is the part that really makes parents stop. Children who are never questioned actually initiate more words themselves. Because the pressure is gone. They talk when they're ready, not because they've been put on the spot.

Getting dressed. Washing hands. Making lunch. Driving to nursery. Every single one of these is a language lesson if you're narrating. And it costs absolutely nothing.

We talk a lot about what we can do for our children's language development. The books we read, the songs we sing, the words we expose them to. And all of that matters.

But the single most powerful language environment a child can be in? Is one where you step back and let them lead.

Unstructured play, no rules, no instructions, no outcome, is where children generate language for themselves. And generating language is a completely different cognitive task from receiving it. When your child picks up a toy and narrates what it's doing, gives it a voice, makes up a story, they are doing something that no book, no audio story, no flashcard can replicate.

This is what we call symbolic play in speech and language therapy. And the research on it is extraordinary. Children who engage in rich pretend play consistently show faster vocabulary growth, stronger narrative skills, and better social communication than those who don't. Not because play teaches them words. Because play gives them a reason to use the words they already have.

I want to be clear, this isn't about removing audio stories or books or any of the things we've talked about. Those are intentional choices. This is about the moments in between. The gaps we fill automatically without thinking. That's where unstructured play lives.

The mistake most parents make is filling every moment. A quiet moment becomes screen time. Downtime becomes background noise. I understand it, I do it myself. But boredom is actually one of the most fertile conditions for language development because it forces children to create their own world with words.

I know this is easier said than done. Some days survival mode is real and that is completely fine. But even ten minutes of genuine unstructured play a day makes a difference. Put the toys on the floor, sit nearby, and let them get on with it.