What’s in a pause? Take a moment to think about it. (#punintended)

It’s the simple little tricks we love the most – pausing is such a simple strategy to use with young children, and works for many different reasons. Join Ayelet in this episode of Learn With Less as she discusses the power of the pause. 

Within this podcast episode, we model ways to play, talk, sing, and move in order to support learning and development, using the things you already have laying around your home.

To learn more about these four pillars of the Learn With Less® curriculum, you can download my free infant/toddler development blueprint.

Below is the transcript of this week’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode.

For additional information, music, play ideas and the complete interactive family experience, please listen to the entire episode. 

Related Links to This Episode to Support Early Development

How to create your own “Lift The Flap” Book to support language development, using items you already have in your home – our corresponding blog post.

Download our free Infant/Toddler Development Blueprint, outlining major areas of learning and development in the first three years of life, and how you can support them using our four pillars of play, talk, sing, & move

How Routines & Rituals Support Infant & Toddler Development, a Learn With Less® podcast episode

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Pause For A Powerful Tool

Today, I want to talk about why pausing with your young child is one of my single most powerful tools in parenting and in my role as a pediatric speech-language pathologist. There are many reasons why pausing during any conversation can be useful… first, we pause to highlight grammatical structures – to mark the end of a sentence, or a shift to a new idea.

We pause for social reasons – to build anticipation, to clarify that we have expectations, to simply gather our thoughts, or to emphasize a point we’re trying to make. Pausing is also a useful strategy for us as parents and caregivers to allow our young children to process what we’ve said.

We know that infants and toddlers are often processing multiple pieces of information (what they hear, what they see, what they’re touching, the way their bodies feel in motion) simultaneously – it’s no wonder that it often takes our little ones more time to attend to what we’ve said or asked of them.

Want to support families in community, helping them feel confident they can support their tiny humans?

Communication Strategy

And finally, using a pause as a strategy to entice your little one to communicate can be very useful. Think about phrases that you use all the time – we all use them – those you just automatically know the way to finish them. For grown-ups, these are often successful advertising slogans like, “Just do ___”, or familiar idioms “When it rains, it ___.” These are unmistakably obvious to most of us socialized in the Western World, because we’ve heard them over and over again – they’re simply phrases that our brains automatically fill in.

Our brains automatically do this when we’re listening to familiar songs, as well – either with the melody and rhythm or with the words. For our children, these are the phrases we use day in, day out. When we pause expectantly before saying part of the phrase, we’re using a particular strategy – and the technical term for this is called using a “cloze procedure.” You may already be doing this without thinking about it, either in daily caregiving routines like washing, dressing, etc., or in musical activities when singing familiar songs or nursery rhymes.

For little ones who are just learning to use gestures, such as pointing, or even touching, using images to communicate thoughts and words is a wonderful first step towards verbal language. As we know, in the progression towards verbal language, we see babbling and gesture before actual words. Honor that gestural communication – when we model language and acknowledge that our children are communicating, we give them incentive to continue in their journey to express themselves.

With children who are non-speaking, using a set of specific images to represent ideas, actions, objects, descriptive words, social words, or people, is a form of symbolic language, known as augmentative and alternative communication.

Social Routines

Modeling both gesture and words simultaneously is a wonderful way to enhance your little one’s learning, and creates a multi-sensory experience involving visual, auditory and movement elements in your interactive play.

Our four-pillar framework of play, talk, sing and move here at Learn With Less® is also a wonderful way to think about how to incorporate developmentally enriching elements into our daily lives. You can learn more about that by downloading my free infant/toddler development blueprint, over at learnwithless.com/blueprint.

Now, there are lots of ways to incorporate pausing and the cloze procedure strategy in our lives with our little ones. Think of all the things you already say each day or each time you complete a caregiving routine. We’ve spoken in the past, in my episode Routines and Rituals about the idea that caregiving routines are not only opportunities for repetition, allowing your child to anticipate what’s coming next, but they are also opportunities to introduce the idea of ritual to an infant or toddler.

Even if this is simply something you say each time in a silly voice, or a song you sing on your way to the bathtub, or a favorite book or poem… these moments become special bonding and interaction time, as well as predictable opportunities that offer comfort and security. I encourage you to take an inventory of the types of rituals you might already be doing (sometimes you have to ask a caregiving partner or really pay attention to these moments, as you may be largely unaware that you’re even doing them!) and think about other simple little ways to add little phrases to your daily care routines.

For instance, when you sit down to set up meal-time, you might say, “Ok, what do we need? A bib and a plate!” If you start saying this at every meal-time, your little one may surprise you by pointing to the objects they see in their vicinity before you even say your phrase, or may respond when you pause – “What do we need? A bib and a ___” by gesturing, vocalizing, or verbalizing. Whatever they do, you can say, “That’s right! A plate!” making sure to provide a verbal model or reinforce the adult pronunciation, and validating their response, at whatever level they were able to give it to you.

Use the Learn With Less® infant and toddler curriculum in a “caregiver + baby” class setting in your community to build family capacity.

Pausing in Books

Book-reading activities are also wonderful opportunities to utilize a pause. I’m particularly in favor of using books with repetitive phrases (I have a whole collection of them on a Pinterest board, as these naturally lend themselves to use of the cloze procedure, if we leave out the final word or other familiar words in the repetitive line, pausing to wait for either a gesture or sign, or the word, before stating or modeling it ourselves.

Ritual, Play and Pausing

I might simply use the same phrase when I get into the car and put on my little one’s seat belt (something like, “arm in, arm in, ____ click!”), or when we are heading down the slide (counting “one, two, ___ three!” or “ready, set, ___ go!”)… and here’s another reason why talking to our little ones is so important – even from infancy!

Everything we say becomes part of their world, whether we’re just bathing them in language, or whether we’re using particular ritual-like language to help them identify patterns and transitions. When we shift the focus slightly and use strategies like pausing, we’re not only giving them opportunities to respond, but also giving them something different to attend to, or to anticipate.

This is part of language play. And you know I always encourage you to play with your little one. Please see below for a link to my YouTube video, which I reference in this week’s episode, and model one of the songs/rhymes we sang. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Learn With Less YouTube channel!

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