Four on the FloorTechno for toddlers

The method

Say less. Wait longer. Do it again tomorrow.

The whole system is one page of instructions and about fifteen minutes a day. Everything else we make is a way of getting you to do those fifteen minutes.

There is a version of early learning that costs a great deal of money and a version that costs almost nothing. The expensive version buys you a room, a timetable and someone else's enthusiasm. The cheap version is the part that the research can actually see working, and you already own all of it.

Here it is, honestly, in three lines.

The three rules

1. Take turns, do not take the floor

The single most useful finding in this field is that conversational turns predict how a child's language network develops, and that they do so largely independently of how many words the adult says, of household income, and of the parent's own education.1 Children in the study with more back-and-forth showed greater activation in Broca's area during language processing, and stronger structural connectivity between the brain's two main language regions.2

A turn is: she makes a sound, you answer it. That is it. A babble counts. A point counts. A look counts.

The practical version

After you say something to her, count to five in your head. Most adults wait about one second. Five feels absurd. Five is where her turn fits.

2. Follow her eyes, not the page

Name what she is already looking at. If she is staring at the corner of the book rather than the picture, the corner of the book is the lesson. Labels attach to whatever attention is already on; that is why "follow-in" naming beats redirecting her to the thing you had planned.

3. Paper first, screen last

Given the same story, printed books produce more of the back-and-forth talk than tablets do; parents and toddlers both say more, and the collaboration between them scores higher.3 The device is not evil. It just quietly takes your turn away from you. That is why the physical book is the centre of this line and the screen is the smallest part of it.

The ladder: one alphabet, four registers

You asked which is right: "A, Amp", or "A is for Amp", or a full sentence. The answer is that they are right at different times, and that you can have all three from the same twenty-six objects.

0–18
MONTHS

The word, alone

Letter names mean nothing at one. What she is doing at this age is finding the edges of words in a stream of sound, and a word said on its own, at the end, with a pause after it is the easiest kind of word to find.

“Amp.”  …  “Amp.” higher pitch than usual, slower, warm, then stop
18M–3
YEARS

Name it, then add one thing

Now she can hold two ideas at once. Label, then expand by exactly one step. Do not deliver a paragraph.

“Amp. That’s an amp.” then wait; if she says anything at all, answer that instead
3–5
YEARS

Now the letter earns its place

This is where "A is for Amp" finally does work, because now the letter is a thing that can hold a sound. Give the name and the sound together.

“A is for Amp. A, ah.” letter name, then the phoneme, then the object
5+
AND YOU

What the thing actually does

The last pages of the book. This is the layer that keeps the object on the shelf instead of in a box, and it is the layer written for the adult who has read the first three hundreds of times.

“An amplifier takes a signal too small to hear and adds power to it, without changing its shape.” true, checkable, and the reason nobody outgrows this
One correction worth making

A clear, soothing, adult voice is not the target. The register the evidence supports is parentese: higher in pitch, slower, exaggerated in intonation, but using real words and real grammar. It is not baby talk and it is not nonsense syllables. In a randomised trial of 71 families, coaching parents in it raised both parentese and turn-taking, and the coached children said more at eighteen months on both a recorded measure and a parent-reported one.4 The parent-reported effect was small and only just cleared significance, and we say so on the evidence page rather than here. Every recorded voice we make is pitched that way on purpose. It will sound slightly silly to you. It is not for you.

Fifteen minutes, and what goes in them

MinutesWhat you doWhat it is for
5The book, on the floor, on her terms. Let her turn the pages badly. Name what she stops on.Turns, joint attention, labels
5Music with movement. Hold her, or hold her hands, and move on the beat. Same track for a week.Rhythm, prediction, and the timing machinery speech runs on5
5Narrate whatever is actually happening. The kettle. The buttons. The stairs.Volume of contingent talk in context

That is the entire curriculum. It is deliberately small, because the failure mode of every early-learning product is that the parent stops.

The one number worth keeping

Not minutes. Not words. Turns. Once a day, for five minutes, count how many times she made a sound and you answered it. Write the number down. It will start around five and it will climb.

Be honest about what this is

A tally on a bit of paper is not a measurement instrument. The research uses full-day audio recorders and automated counts. What the tally does is change your behaviour, which is the part that was going to matter anyway.

When it is not working

  • She will not sit still. Correct. She is not supposed to. Follow her around and name things. The book is a prop, not a lesson plan.
  • She only wants one page. Excellent. Repetition is how this works. Read the same page forty times; the fortieth is doing more than the first.
  • She says nothing back. Answer the non-verbal things: a look, a reach, a bang on the table. Those are turns.
  • You are bored. That is what layer four is for. Read her the real definition. She will not understand it. She will hear that you meant it.
Say this out loud, please

If you have any concern at all about her hearing, her speech, or how she is developing, go and see a paediatrician or a speech-language pathologist. Do not give it three months. Do not give it this website. Early support is the single highest-value thing in this entire field, and it is not something we sell.

Sources on this page