Grocery shopping and language learning

I am the primary grocery-shopper in our household, not least because shopping trips are pure language-learning gold for a toddler. If you get the shopping cart with a child-seat in front of you, you can carry on a constant conversation with your child, in low tones if necessary, so as not to get on people's nerves. Thousands of new objects present themselves, and your child wants to know what each one is and what it's for. There is also ample opportunity for regular repetition of new material during subsequent trips. 

One incredibly productive and yet very simple thing you can do is talk through your shopping list out loud, saying what you need, musing over where to find it, "remembering" and describing where to find it, then going there and getting it. You're bound to cover all object genders in singular and plural, as well as all sorts of useful directional adverbs and expressions. Once you've done this a few times, you can enlist your child into "helping you remember" where to find things.

When your child gets bored of that, or when they're older, you can have books on hand. I find the German basic knowledge series Wieso, weshalb, warum perfect for shopping trips. 

They all have little fold-out pictures with short texts. 

When J asks what the texts say, I move the cart to the side of the isle, lean forward, quickly read the text for him, 

then continue shopping. 

Add on ten or fifteen minutes of an audiobook on the way there and home, and you've accomplished a massive amount of language-enabling, all while getting your shopping done.