Parents can teach alternate meanings of words through word games in which you try to come up with as many meanings as possible for words. For example, the word 'rock' can mean to 'rock in a chair', 'rock music', 'rock that you throw', or 'rock hard'. Parents may capitalize on children's humor for teaching multiple meanings. Joke and riddle books may be used. For older children, parents can also talk about shades of difference in meaning for groups of words that share meaning to be considered synonyms but have small differences.
Parents can play a casual game with children by saying sentences where meaning keeps changing.
Children need to develop an understanding of how words fit together into larger networks based on meaning. Parents can play word games listing superordinate and subordinate categories. Parents could also use a picture sorting game. Pictures of animals can be categorized into jungle, farm, forest, domestic, etc. Older children could be shown how words can have different specialized meanings in particular subject areas.