The house-words hunt
Vocabulary grows when you name what you do together
Learning through play
Words aren't taught with flashcards: they're fished out of life. You roam the house naming what you touch, but the trick is stretching each word — not "cup", but "a blue cup that's cold" — and giving back what they say with one more word. Your little one doesn't repeat lists: they converse with you, and that's how vocabulary really grows, hooked to what they're doing.
By age: At 2-3, name objects and add one word to what they say; at 4-6, describe what things are for and play at sorting them.
What you’ll need
- ·The whole house
- ·Optional: a bag or basket to collect the hunted objects
Getting ready
Pick a room to start the hunt. Nothing to prepare.
How it goes, step by step
- 1
Roam a room touching and naming things: "the spoon", "the pillow"
- 2
Stretch each word: not just "apple", but "a red, round apple"
- 3
When they say a word, give it back with one more: they say "water", you say "yes, cold water"
- 4
Play at sorting: everything soft, everything you can eat
- 5
Close by recalling together three new words you hunted today
Safety
Hunt with eyes and clean hands; no putting small objects in the mouth.
Your tool for the moment
The technique is called "expansion": you repeat what they say and add a word. It's not correcting, it's enlarging. A child hears thousands of words a day at home — those conversations, not screens, are what grow their language.
The phrase they keep
«I touch a thing. I give it its name. I learn a new word.»
The pedagogical why
A child's vocabulary depends above all on the amount and quality of adult-child conversation (back-and-forth turns), not on the number of words heard in the background. Naming, expanding and conversing in daily life is what builds language most.
Honestly: Comparing one child's vocabulary with another's is of little use: the normal range is huge. What helps is talking to them a lot and listening, not measuring.
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA); Hart & Risley (1995) and Romeo et al. (2018), "conversational turns" and language development
Grounded in developmental psychology and citable sources. It does not replace a professional’s assessment; if anything worries you, talk to your paediatrician.
What you get
- 1
The activity’s audio guide in Tilo’s voice, step by step
- 2
The everyday materials you’ll need — nothing to buy
- 3
The illustrated story and its audio story for this same situation
- 4
The Moment’s song, made to measure
- 5
The family guide: how to hold the play, and the rest of the week, from a calm place
Digital delivery by email. The confirmed delivery window will be shown before payment.
The house-words hunt
Vocabulary grows when you name what you do together
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