Ok so to be honest, this one took me a little while to grasp: Toddlers aren’t always intentionally ignoring you, they just don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. A few years ago my brother in law’s family was visiting and their little 2 year old loved playing with our lab. But she had a tendency to pull his tail. Over and over someone would say, “Don’t pull his tail.” And she’d smile and walk right over and pull his tail. Finally (much longer than it should have taken one of the six adults in the room), her father thought to attach meaning to the word tail by pointing and explaining what the heck the dog’s “tail” was. “This is his tail.” And she never grabbed it again. Adults, in all of our years of developing language and experiences attached to language, often take for granted that we KNOW what a word means. But so much of learning what the word means depends on your engagement and experience with the word. We know hot because we’ve experiences MANY HOT days, we have taken many HOT showers, we have probably burned ourselves on multiple HOT pans… those experiences have also given depth to our understanding of the word HOT and the different ways it could be applied. Your two year old in their VERY limited experience, who has just began exploring with more freedom, has an incredibly small word bank and an even smaller understanding of the different dimensions of the words in their bank.
I always begin my story times with a story sequence. In the early stages of my story times I spoke this story sequence. Sometimes the children would follow my moves but most of the time I couldn’t really begin to engage them until after the sequence was done and I had brought the picture book out. I began to realize that they needed context to some of the elements of the story sequence. These children didn’t know what the word “mountain” was but when shown a picture, they could begin to attach the word to the image; they could begin to have an experience with the word. Once they were able to comprehend what I was saying (prompted by pictures), they were able to engage.
Comprehension promotes engagement. Try adding context to what you’re asking your toddler to do and see if it helps them to understand, to comprehend, and to further engage with you and their developing word bank.