6-12 months

Your baby loves to hear your voice. Sing a nursery rhyme to your baby or even make up your own song.
Use a range of tones of voice, such as using a quiet or loud, low or high voice and vary the speed such as fast and slow.
Watch your baby’s facial expressions to see how they react to your voice.
Try using simple actions with the nursery rhyme, this is great at developing their looking and listening skills as well as helping your baby learn the meaning of the words in the rhyme.
As you repeat this activity with a range of rhymes your baby will start to copy the actions in the song.
For action rhyme ideas, visit Cbeebies Nursery Rhymes or Singing Hands.

Sit or lie your baby in front of you so they can see your face.
Make funny faces such as licking your tongue in and out, making a smiley face, puffing out your cheeks, open your mouth wide, blow raspberries or kisses and see if your baby can copy you.
As you repeat this activity your baby will be really interested in your face and will start to try to copy you.
You could even try doing this with a baby safe mirror so your baby can see their reflection.
These movements will help to exercise your baby’s mouth muscles ready for talking. It’s a great mouth gym exercise!

Collect a few objects and toys from round the house and put them in a bag or pillowcase.
Encourage your baby to find an object from the bag.
Spend a few minutes playing with the object.
Talk about what it's called, what we do with it, how it feels.
Let your baby hold and explore the object.
Repeat this with the rest of the objects in the bag.
Watch this activity at BBC Tiny Happy People