Ming teaches how to help preverbal children start talking through signing, gestures, and routines like bubble-blowing. Adults reinforce even tiny sounds and gestures, then gradually model single words to shape them toward speech.
We teach children to use a lot of signing, a lot of gestures, imitation of actions and so on to build towards speech. And then slowly, we want the child to start saying some word approximates. We don't even care if the word's right or wrong. Even if a child says, ah, like that, I will still say, yes, good boy. So the whole thing looks like this. I will show them this bubble, and then I'll give it to the child. The child will be like, ugh, I don't know. I can't open it. It's too heavy. Tries to give it back to me. I hold it. I wait here, because there's already a routine of him knowing that he knows that I need to open it in order to blow, right? So I'll wait here and I'll say something or do an action or tell him to do something. Like, for instance, open, open. If he even makes a tiny squeak of noise like. Like that. I was like, yes, open. I'll open it, pull it out again, and right before I blow, I will try one more thing. Might be blow. It might be. And usually children will pretend to blow like. Like that. And I will acknowledge and say, yes, nice. Yes, blow, and I'll blow.
