I had a phone call this morning from a very young customer – a three year old, actually. He’d just received our new SnapWords™ Noun cards and was chatting excitedly about them. While I couldn’t understand everything he said over the bad phone connection, I also talked to his mother afterward.
The child's mother said that he loves the words, and that they are perfect for his age. She loves the fact that the words in the list are helping him fine tune the meaning behind words he hears. For instance, in the set of nouns we include “city,” “town,” and “country” as well as “world” and “planet.”
This little boy had already asked his mother about the difference between city and town. She said that the visuals embedded in the words visually conveyed the difference in a way that was more effective than a verbal explanation would be.
As we continued to chat about other things, our talk was punctuated by the child’s asking, “What does this one say?” and “What does it say down here?” (He could see the plain word on the back of the cards as well as the sentence containing the word and a body motion to reflect the meaning of the word.)
What this phone conversation reminded me is that going beyond word recognition, learning to talk or learning to read, we can prepare our youngest members of society for a depth of meaning and understanding in their communication by using visuals to relay richer detail about words we use. These details will add to their grasp of our language and broaden their ability to use their acquired vocabulary with discrimination.
You can read more about the SnapWords™ Noun cards in our store or download some free samples to try out with your own children/ students.
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