How to Incorporate Language into Everyday Routines, with Miranda Zoumbaris and Ayelet Marinovich

Use Everyday Routines to Build Language Skills In Young Children: It’s Powerful!

This episode of the Learn With Less® podcast is the second of a 4-part series about incorporating play, language, music, and movement, into everyday routines. These episodes feature a conversation between Ayelet Marinovich (pediatric speech-language pathologist, founder and creator of the Learn With Less® curriculum) and Miranda Zoumbaris (early childhood educator & interventionist, licensed Learn With Less® facilitator, and entrepreneur).

In this series, we’ll explore the four pillars of the Learn With Less® framework, and examine how we can incorporate more of each of those into our everyday routines to support connection and early learning. For each episode, we chose one routine and one everyday object, and explored the ways in which we could infuse developmentally enriching experiences into everyday life, and helping families see they can do this using the time, energy, and materials they already have.

Be sure to check over at our Instagram and Facebook pages (linked below) for additional content that may support your understanding and experience of these episodes. As we release each episode, we’ll link to them here in the show notes so you can access them easily.

In this episode, we discussed:

• What is TALK (as we define it in the Learn With Less® curriculum), and how it can be woven into everyday routines
• How to take the routine of nose-blowing and other self care routines, and incorporate more language into these moments
• What kinds of language routines we can create with an item like a tissue or tissue box
• Using language to create levity in a stressful moment – for both children and adults
• How to incorporate language strategies into simple routines, using simple, everyday objects
• The value of learning in community, of parallel processing with other families, and of experiencing the practice of following your child’s lead, through caregiver and child classes like those led by licensed Learn With Less® facilitators

Helpful Resources to Acknowledge For This Episode:

Daily Routines Freebie: download Miranda’s free handout about winter dressing, and get ideas for incorporating play, talk, sing, and move into your everyday routines!

Free Infant/Toddler Development Blueprint: what are the four major areas of early development… and how can you use the pillars of Learn With Less® to support that learning, using the time, energy, and materials you already have?! Download our free blueprint today.

How to Incorporate Play into Everyday Routines: our first episode in this podcast series, featuring a conversation with Miranda Zoumbaris and Ayelet Marinovich

How to Incorporate Music Into Everyday Routines, the third episode in this 4-part series!

How to Incorporate Movement Into Everyday Routines, the final episode in this 4-part series!

The Power of the Pause, an early Learn With Less® episode

Learn With Less® Facilitator Training & Certification Program, helping educators and therapists create lasting impact in their communities with a high quality, evidence-based, “plug & play” program

Expand Your Impact Workshop Bundle: for early childhood educators and developmental therapists hoping to serve new families in their community and support themselves, using their existing skills

Learn With Less® Bundle: our best infant and toddler development resources for families and educators alike, including our bestselling books Understanding Your Baby and Understanding Your Toddler, our acclaimed family music album, recorded Learn With Less® “caregiver & me” classes, and a caregiver handout featuring ideas for carryover in the home

Learn With Less® Stories: Testimonials from educators who’ve provided the Learn With Less® infant/toddler family enrichment curriculum and families who’ve experienced our programming.

Connect With Us:

Miranda: Website / Facebook / Instagram

Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest

Text Transcript of this Episode

Ayelet: Okay, welcome back to the Learn with Less® Podcast. Today I am joined by my current co-host Miranda Zoumbaris. Hi, Miranda!

Miranda: Hi! I’m so glad to be back!

Ayelet: Yay! Let’s go ahead… Last week, we had an episode all about that first pillar of Learn With Less®, which is PLAY. So, go back, if you haven’t listened to that, and grab all of the things that we talked about, listen to all of that, and catch up with all of the content that we’ve created over on Instagram and Facebook and places at @earlyinterventionmama and @learnwithless, and you can get caught up with all the great stuff all about PLAY. But this week… Miranda, what are we talking about this week?

Miranda: We’re going to talk about TALK! We’re going to talk about talk, and talk about playing with some tissues or tissue boxes.

Ayelet: Yeah, last week, we talked a little bit about what play is, and then different routine examples of using a specific object in play. This week, we’re going to do the same thing about TALK. And the object that we’ve chosen for this week is, as you said, that whole routine of blowing your nose. Blowing, the sort of handkerchief, nose blowing, tissue pulling type stuff. Tissues and self care, really, is the topic that we’re gonna chat about.

Let’s talk a little bit about what talk is, as we define it in Learn With Less®. I can start there. And then I’m going to hand it off to you to chat a little bit more about the different routines that we’re going to chat about. So when we’re talking about this pillar of TALK, what we’re really discussing is discussion, the act of discussion and observation. The idea of repetition with variation. Because every single day, we hope, you’re having some kind of conversation with your young child. Within daily routines… is such a wonderful time to really give into that discussion and observation. Instead of quietly changing your child’s diaper, this is a great opportunity to say the same kinds of things at the same time. Because then you’re repeating yourself and giving context to words.

So for instance, oh, let’s take it off, when you’re taking off the diaper. You can sequence events, and look at what’s coming next, and all of those things. So you’re repeating, and you’re giving a lot of consistency, but then a little bit of variation, right, the pattern adjusts a little bit each time. We’re also talking about, when we’re talking about TALK, we’re having this conversation about communicating for a variety of purposes, not just “what’s this, what’s that” – labeling, which is, I think, something that a lot of us as adults tend to get stuck in in terms of quizzing and drilling our little ones. That’s how oftentimes we’ve learned what learning is! It looks like taking tests and quizzing.

Also as the grownups in the room, we want to hear our children say those words, we want to see that they can identify something. We want to know what they know, we want to see what they know. We want to show our loved ones what they know. And also, because again, we’re talking about not just the but/or its AND. So, we want to communicate for a variety of purposes. We want to ask our child questions. We want to wonder aloud, we want to imitate them. We want to talk about what’s happening around us, how something feels, what it looks like. And notice what they are noticing – and say those things out loud.

And then, of course, we also want to communicate to our little ones using a variety of means and modes of communication, right? We know that right now, Miranda and I are sitting at two different computers looking at each other on Zoom, and she’s nodding, That tells me that she’s listening, right, and she’s smiling. That tells me that she’s engaged. And all of those nonverbal communication skills also assist in communicating and engaging with each other as humans. So wh