Milestone Cards

All five volumes of Your Baby Can Learn! Milestone Cards.

There are two types of Milestone Cards:

• Horizontal Milestone Cards
• This set of Milestone Cards includes the blue Volume 1 cards. These cards have the same word multiple times on each card, but the word is presented with variablity in its font, font color, background color, and font sizes. The generalizable shape of the word stays constant while less important factors vary. This is to highlight that the shape of a word is more important than less relevant characteristics. By age two, children have a shape bias, or a tendency to organize objects by shape rather than other attributes (such as color). Learning the shape bias is an important milestone for understanding the meanings of words because categorizing objects by their shapes generally gives infants more information about the objects’ functions than organizing by color or texture.
• Vertical Milestone Cards
• The Volume 2 and Volume 3 Milestone Cards (with orange and red background colors) are designed to give infants and young children many opportunities to see and hear words that differ in only one phoneme – the smallest unit of speech that can impact the meaning of a word. Volume 2 (orange) and Volume 3 (red) cards have words are very similar or that differ in only one sound. These cards have similar derivations of the same word (such as ear and ears) on each card, which gives your child opportunities to notice very small differences between spoken and written words. Please highlight how the words are similar and different while pronouncing them precisely.
• The Volume 4 Milestone Cards (with green backgrounds) combine familiar words into short phrases. Some of the phrases are very similar, making it challenging for many children to notice the differences. Again, please point out how the cards are similar and how they differ. You may use these cards to encourage your child to say more phrases – an important language milestone for communicating.
• The Volume 5 Milestone Cards have rhyming words and word families.