Squeals, coos, and raspberries—your baby is experimenting with every sound their little mouth can make.
These activities expand vocal repertoire, encourage babbling patterns, and build the oral motor control that prepares for speech production.
Your baby is reaching for things now! Hang a toy within arm's reach and watch them bat at it—this is hand-eye coordination in action.
Shake a rattle to one side, then the other. Your baby is learning to turn toward sounds and track moving objects—building foundations for attention.
First laughs are happening! Play gentle peekaboo and make silly faces. These joyful moments are actually building social-emotional circuitry.
Fill a basket with safe textured objects and narrate what baby touches — smooth, bumpy, soft, crinkly — pairing sensory exploration with descriptive words.
Use soft rattles and your voice from different positions to encourage your baby to turn toward sounds — a foundational skill for language development.
Introduce simple signs for 'more,' 'all done,' and 'eat' during meals — giving your baby a way to communicate before words come along.
Snuggle up with a high-contrast board book and narrate the pictures using an animated voice — building your newborn's love of stories from day one.
Point to pictures in a sturdy board book and name them with enthusiasm — building your baby's vocabulary long before they can say the words themselves.
Play peek-a-boo with favorite toys, naming each one as it appears — combining the thrill of surprise with vocabulary building.