Ready For the Baby: Basic Vocabulary
| This is an entry in the “Getting Ready For the Baby” series. We’ll be talking about babies all week!
This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3) |
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If you have children—or if the people in your life have children—you know that they bring a lot of new experiences into your life. And, with those new experiences comes new vocabulary. If you want to talk about those experiences in English, you need to learn the vocabulary of babies.
Today, we’re going to get a start learning that vocabulary.
Before You Start the Recording
I’m sure you can talk about babies—at least, the simple vocabulary—in your own language. Think about the things that you need for a baby, and about the things you do with a baby. If you have these ideas in your head when you listen to the recording, it will make the English vocabulary easier to recognize and to learn.
Now start the recording.
After You’ve Heard the Recording
Okay, you learned—or reviewed—three new words today. Before I repeat them, can you review them yourself? Did everything stick?
Have you ever had to change a baby? Do you have any experience with diapers? Do you think my wife and I made the right decision to use cloth, re-useable diapers? What do you think about us buying a changing table? Do you think we wasted our money? Or was it a good idea?
One more time, here’s the vocabulary from this recording:
Vocabulary
Diaper: I think we all know that babies can’t use the toilet by themselves. At least, not when they’re born. Because they still eat—and what they still eat comes out—one of the problems that new parents face is how to keep the stuff that comes out from getting on everything, there are diapers. A ‘diaper’ can mean a few different things, but they’re all made to cover a baby’s bottom, and to keep it from getting the parents’ apartment dirty.
Change a diaper/Change a baby: Because diapers are what they are, they get dirty often. Very often. And, because babies shouldn’t live in their own poop, it’s important that when one diaper is dirty, it is traded for a clean diaper. Taking off the dirty diaper and putting on the clean diaper is called changing the diaper, or sometimes, changing the baby. Both phrases mean you take the dirty diaper off the baby, clean the baby, and put the clean diaper back on.
Changing table: You can change a diaper almost everywhere. On a bed, or on the floor. But, they make special tables that are the right size and height to work change a baby’s diaper while you’re standing. They say that these changing tables can really save your back when you change the baby, because you don’t have to bend over as much.
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