Building Baby's Language Skills

If you would like to boost your baby's language skills, one way is to get out the building blocks!

According to a six-month study of 18- to 30-month-olds, those who played with blocks had about 15 percent bigger vocabularies than those who didn't. The reasoning behind this is that blocks, along with other toys such as dolls and cars, provide parents a way to actively play with and talk with their baby, while at the same time offer a way to subtly lay a foundation for their baby's language skills.

The study author Dimitri Christakis, MD, states that it's not just the time the parents spend playing with their baby, it's the benefit later on when their baby is playing alone that he will recreate what you did. While playing, if you say, "This block is yellow", then later on when your baby is playing with the blocks he will be thinking, "yellow".