It is not un-natural for boys to choose playing with their cars and trains to reading a book.
Our boys do that all the time whilst our daughter is more of a book worm and we’d probably have a harder time trying to get her to go out and play and to leave her book indoors!
With boys, it seems to be the other way.
All is not lost however because there are so many other ways in which you can enrich your child’s language by using the very things that they are interested in the most.
Our youngest son is in love with the Cars 2 character cars ever since he saw the film. This is great for us! It means we can talk to him and get to talk more about the characters whilst he is lying on the floor racing his cars. He is more interested in playing, but provided we are talking about the Cars 2 characters, he doesn’t mind us interrupting. So, we use this time to talk and we use his Cars 2 characters as language-enrichment toys. Toy retailers use the success of films to churn out lots of toys and merchandise related to the highly successful films, it is, after all, a way for them to make more money.
However, you can use this to your advantage because it gives you more choice as to what you select for your children. You don’t have to buy your children every single item that comes out in a collection. The Cars 2 film has spawned the World Grand Prix and the Race Launcher from Cars 2 but our son isn’t going to get everything that is Cars 2 related. Most likely, we know he loves the individual cars and so we will get a few of his favorite ones for him. He can chat away for a good while about Lightning McQueen and Mater.
Our older son has the large Thomas the Tank Engine train set with all its various train characters that can be joined together or pulled apart and a train track that can be arranged in different ways, it also comes with bridges and posts. He can spend hours playing with this but we use this as a problem solving and creative play toy.
He will arrange the track so that one train can go that way whilst another can go another route, he will fasten trains together or pull some apart. Or even link a whole lot of them together and wonder why they are going so slowly.
So, get more out of the toys your children already have and play with and spend time with them when they are playing using more complex words that they might not be used to. It’s a great way of spending quality time with your child for sure.