Ready For the Baby: Even More Vocab
| 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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Babies, I think you know, aren’t very mobile. They don’t move around much by themselves. That means that, if you want to go anywhere with your baby, you’re going to carry him with you. And that opens a whole new category of things you need to get for your baby, and a whole new category of English vocabulary. You probably know all of the things we’re going to talk about today, but how well can you talk about them in English? Improving that will be our goal today.
Before You Start the Recording
This is a very straightforward—that means, uncomplicated—category. The things that we use to move babies about are the same everywhere. It might help if you take a moment to think about the things you think I will talk about in the recording. You should be able to recognize the words I’m talking about more quickly if you already have the ideas in your mind.
Now start the recording.
After You’ve Heard the Recording
How many of these thing did you use with your kids? Or did your parents use with you? What do you think of the baby sling? I told you I don’t know yet how I feel about it. When I was a baby, my mother used a stroller to take us out for walks. In the house, we were in a bassinet.
What’s common in your country? What do you think is better?
Vocabulary
Baby sling: When I was a baby, my mother used a stroller to take us out. Now, though, a lot of parents are using a long piece of fabric—sometimes five meters long or more—to wrap around the baby and themselves. With this baby sling, they hold the baby close to their body and have both hands free.
Stroller: Another common way to get a baby out of the apartment is in a kind of wagon made just for babies and children. This stroller normally has three or four wheels and a handle for pushing. In English, a stroller is used for babies, and also for ‘older’ children. (I mean children who are maybe two or three years old.)
Bassinet: A stroller is for moving the baby around outside. Inside the house or the apartment, some families use a bassinet. The bassinet is like a mix between a stroller—it has wheels—and a bed for babies. The baby can sleep in it, and you can move it from one room to the next.
Photo Credit
The photo above is from Flickr. It was taken by Willy-Nilly and made available under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Willy-Nilly, for making this photo available.
