Jenna Brooks
Parenting & Communication Writer
Jenna Brooks writes about parent-child communication, everyday routines, and supportive strategies for helping children express themselves. Her articles focus on making speech-friendly play simple, encouraging, and easy to include in family life.
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How to Make Storytime More Interactive for Children Who Use AAC
Reading together should give children a chance to share ideas, make choices, and enjoy a story—even when spoken words are difficult or unreliable. For children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), storytime can include pointing to pictures, selecting messages on a communication device, using signs, making sounds, or responding through facial expressions and body…
ASHA Communication Milestones: Parent Update
ASHA Communication Milestones help parents review speech, language, and hearing skills from birth to age 5 without replacing evaluation.
How bilingual decodable texts Build Biliteracy
Use bilingual decodable texts to support K–3 biliteracy with phonics, family reading routines, and realistic progress checks.
Child Response Time: Why Pausing Helps Children Talk
A child does not always answer the moment a question ends. Understanding child response time can help parents recognize that those quiet seconds may be active thinking rather than avoidance, confusion, or unwillingness to participate. Children may be interpreting the question, finding the right words, deciding what they want to say, or working out how…
Multilingual Vocabulary Activities for Word Growth
Use multilingual vocabulary activities with shared reading, word maps, home-language links, and careful progress checks for growing learners.
Teacher Discourse Strategies for Bilingual Speech
Teacher discourse strategies can shape bilingual preschool talk. See what recent studies support, what remains uncertain, and what to try.
Child Self-Reporting In Bilingual Proficiency
Child Self-Reporting can add useful context to bilingual proficiency checks when paired with parent input and direct language measures.
Houston Questionnaire for Bilingual Children
Use the Houston Questionnaire to understand bilingual child self-report, language exposure, and limits in Spanish-English proficiency checks.
How to Use Family Photos to Encourage Conversation and Storytelling
Family photos are usually treated as keepsakes, not language tools. Yet family photos for language development can give children something generic picture cards cannot: a familiar event they may remember, care about, and want to discuss. That familiarity can turn “Who is this?” into a longer exchange about what happened, how someone felt, and what…
Bilingual Language Activities That Support Growth
Use bilingual language activities with clear goals, shared reading, explicit teaching, and family routines grounded in recent child language research.