The easiest way for parents to become language teachers at home is through NARRATION. In your child’s opinion, you (the parent) are the most interesting thing in the house; that is unless there is a big brother or a big sister present, in which case the bigger sibling tends to steal all the attention, but the parent is still a strong runner up! Either way, your child watches and listens to everything that you do. Once you engage your child in an activity by talking to them directly and showing them what you are doing, they will study your actions like a hawk. Making coffee? Fascinating. Sending an email? Incredible! Putting on the microwave? Absolutely enthralling. By narrating your day, explaining how you make your coffee, verbalizing the process behind opening up the computer, finding your mailbox, opening up a new mail, etc, you bring your child into your world. Don’t underestimate your child’s ability to understand complicated narration about things beyond toys, colors, or farm animals. Children should listen to you talking about your feelings, why you’re frustrated or happy, why you’re sad or what it takes to change the SIM card in your phone. This type of narration will introduce new vocabulary beyond the farm animal words, colors, and other baby-type topics and give your child an opportunity to excel linguistically and emotionally. They might not understand what you’re doing, but they’ll start associating language with more layers; they’ll start to understand that Brown Bear Brown Bear is only the tip of the iceberg! Narrating throughout the day includes explaining that you have to hurry to get to work because you have an important meeting with your clients that you can describe in detail. Narrating includes saying that you are frustrated about the news on the radio and delving into the reasons why you are frustrated. Through your narration, your child will consciously and subconsciously absorb what you are saying. Narrating your day is an incredibly valuable gift to your child; in fact, children whose parents narrate about their actions throughout the day learn much more vocabulary and tend to speak earlier and with more ease. Why? It is simply because they hear more words. A child cannot learn a language in silence.