Talking about actions
Once a child has a naming vocabulary of about 20-30 words it is useful to teach some verbs or action words. This can help the child to move from a one word to a two word or phrase level of expressing themselves.
Children first learn to understand and use verbs by hearing them used to describe what they or others are doing. The verb is used to describe an action happening in the present tense. These verbs often end with 'ing' e.g. 'Eating…eating dinner'. Later children learn to use grammatical rules to alter verbs for use in the future and past tenses. Even later on they learn to remember the irregular verbs that need special grammatical rules e.g. to buy → bought, to catch → caught.
It is easiest to teach verbs which describe actions that the children themselves can do and which can be seen e.g. jumping, climbing, drinking. It is more difficult to teach verbs which can't be seen such as, to like, to want . Begin with the easier verbs and move on to the others later.