How do animal sounds help your child talk? Animal sounds are easier for a young child to imitate than most words. Helping your child learn various animal sounds will give him/her practice communicating while he/she is learning words.
Using animal sounds to help your child can be approached in a variety of ways, but it should always be fun for your child. It is important to remember that communication is not about going through a list of animals and their sounds and trying to get your child to imitate you. You want communication to be an enjoyable experience so your child is motivated to communicate with words. The animal sounds strategy can be used when reading books, playing with animal puppets or animal toys, or if you are pretending to be different animals with your child.
When you are playing with your child or reading a book make the animal sounds. Make it fun and be silly with it. For instance, if you see the cow picture or you have a cow puppet or toy you can say “moo” with varying loudness (i.e. moo, moo, MOO, MOO), length (i.e. moo, moooooo), or intonation (i.e. mooOOooo). You can have the cow talk to your child with “moo”. In short, you can’t repeat the animal sound too much. Don’t put pressure on your child to say the sound. The next time you come to the cow page or when you play again you can pause to see if your child will say “moo”. If not, continue to say moo like you did previously. Sometimes kids need to hear a word/animal sound over 100 times before they will even attempt at imitating it. Meanwhile, you are having fun with your child and showing your child the joy of communicating.
This is a good strategy to start with if your child has 0-5 words in his/her vocabulary or if your child’s sound development is quite limited.